Trust Your Instincts, Even in the Dark Forest

2026-03-30

A wizard takes a girl from her village and tries to teach her magic his way — precise, structured, by the book. She’s terrible at it. She keeps failing. But when she stops trying to be him and starts doing magic her way — messy, instinctive, rooted in who she actually is — she becomes more powerful than he ever expected.

That’s the core of Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, and it delighted me beyond my expectation of what a fantasy novel typically does.

The book won the Nebula Award, and it deserves it — but what stayed with me wasn’t the plot. It was the distinction between two ways of facing what’s broken. The corrupting Wood in the story spreads by consuming people from the inside. One response is to wall it off, keep your distance, stay clean. The other is to engage — to walk into the darkness and try to understand what’s driving it. Neither is obviously right. But the character who chooses engagement, who refuses to just burn what she doesn’t understand, is the one who actually solves the problem.

I picked this up on a Brandon Sanderson recommendation and couldn’t put it down. Novik — a Lithuanian-Jewish, Brown-educated computer scientist turned fantasy author who co-founded Archive of Our Own — writes with this rare warmth that makes a 400-page novel feel like sitting by a fire.

If you’ve read something recently that changed how you think about an old problem, I’d love to hear about it. Email me.