Uprooted works because the forest is the villain. The Wood at the valley's edge isn't scenery — it's patient, corrupting and awake, and it wants the people in it. Against that, Naomi Novik gives you Agnieszka: an overlooked village girl with mud on her boots and magic that comes out as song and improvisation, taken away by the Dragon, a wizard far more irritable than dashing. You can smell the pines and feel the cold of the tower, and it's all done in a single standalone that somehow feels as complete as a whole trilogy.
If you've finished it and gone looking — for what to read after Uprooted, or whether there's a sequel (there isn't, and it doesn't need one) — what you're usually chasing is some mix of three things: that Slavic-fairytale folklore, a landscape that fights back, and the prickly, antagonistic slow burn between a wild girl and a difficult mentor. The good news is that Novik wrote a companion in the same key, and several other authors are circling the same firelight.
Here's what we'd reach for next, our own shelves first.
The one you loved
Dark ForestEarthy Magic
Uprooted
Every ten years the wizard takes a girl from the valley, and this time, to everyone's surprise, he takes Agnieszka — clumsy, perpetually grubby, and quietly furious about it. The magic here smells of woodsmoke and turned earth, and the corrupted Wood at the valley's edge is genuinely creeping. Read it when you want a fairy tale with mud under its nails.
If you loved Uprooted, try these
Novik again, in exactly the same Slavic-fairytale key — a Rumpelstiltskin reweaving with a cold fae king's bargain, wintry folk magic and a handful of clever, stubborn women turning silver into power. If it was Uprooted's whole register you loved, start here.
On our shelves →
A wild Russian girl keeps faith with the old household spirits while a hungry darkness gathers in the winter wood and her family stops believing. The nearest cousin to Uprooted's sentient forest and its earthy, instinctive magic.
On our shelves →
A prickly folklore scholar snowed into a village where the fae are entirely real and entirely dangerous, with a barbed slow burn to rival Agnieszka and the Dragon. Folkloric menace, deep snow and a very dry wit.
On our shelves →
A girl raised among living, dangerous books and a haughty young sorcerer whose sniping slowly warms into something else — the antagonistic mentor-and-pupil spark of Uprooted set in a proper fairy-tale frame.
On our shelves →
Kingfisher's grim little fairy tale with real teeth: bone magic, a goblin market and an impossible task stitched together by hand. For when you loved how dark Uprooted was willing to go beneath the folklore.
On our shelves →
The vain, prickly wizard and the practical girl who ends up keeping his house in order; a curse to break and a slow, sparring affection. The older template the Dragon's whole dynamic quietly draws on.
On our shelves →
An ordinary outsider thrown together with a sharp-tongued, reluctant magician, a curse to unpick and properly crackling enemies-to-lovers sparks — squarely aimed at the prickly-magician slow burn at Uprooted's heart.
On our shelves →
Marillier's lush Celtic retelling of the Six Swans: a forest thick with old magic and a heroine carrying out a near-impossible, almost wordless task. A fairy-tale retelling we don't yet stock, but a perennial answer to 'what next after Uprooted'.
Good questions
Spinning Silver first — same author, same Slavic-fairytale spirit, a wholly separate story. After that, The Bear and the Nightingale for the hungry-winter-wood feeling, and Sorcery of Thorns if it was the prickly slow burn you came for.
No. Uprooted is a complete standalone in one volume. Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver shares its folkloric register but is a separate book, not a continuation — and Uprooted's story is fully resolved on its own.
Yes. It's a single self-contained novel that reads as full and satisfying as many trilogies — one of the reasons people love it and then struggle to find the next thing.
Katherine Arden's Winternight books, beginning with The Bear and the Nightingale, are the usual pairing: Slavic folklore, a malevolent winter wood and quiet, instinctive folk magic.
For the folklore-and-forest side, Katherine Arden and Juliet Marillier; for the prickly-sorcerer slow burn, Margaret Rogerson, Diana Wynne Jones and Freya Marske. We've gathered all of them above.
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