Reading books and loving them.

This week I started and finished! reading Naomi Novik's Uprooted.  It's really really good.  It's so good I stayed up till ten past midnight finishing it.  I haven't stayed up late reading in literally years. I'd guess at in over 3 years.  I had been told Uprooted is a YA novel.  Not from my reading it's not.  It's got a 17 year old protagonist/heroine, but that's because it's a fantasy book and certain types of fantasy books follow strict structures, it doesn't make it a YA book.  This book does follow fantasy tropes, but it doesn't come across as repeating a hundred other stories.

It is wonderfully written, the prose isn't clever or complex, or basic, but it flows and it engages and it got it's hooks into me and I just wanted to keep on and keep on reading it.  I'm aware this is a pretty terrible review and I'm uttering blithe praise, but that's because it's been ages since I wrote about something, and tbh, I enjoyed it too much to sit and analyse it.

I hear it's being turned into a film.  Reading it, I realised why I won't like film adaptations.  They cannot replicate the prose and the pleasure of reading.  The story is great, sure, it will probably look very epic and magical on screen, but they will lose the sense of character and homeliness and everydayness that the book gives you, through the writing.  Books give you so much more a film ever can.  I won't see it, but I will press the book on everyone I think might enjoy it.