Uprooted

There's a lot of interest overlap there.

And there's been some, again, Naomi Novik has done Uprooted, for instance.

It has like a strange detour where the protagonist goes where the love interest isn't, which you wouldn't normally do in a romance.

But otherwise, it just feels like straight up romantic.

That takes us right into our next thematic grouping, where we explore the forest as a hungry, living mind.

We are looking at Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood and Naomi Novik's Uprooted.

Okay.

If we are discussing the forest as an active psychological engine, Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood, which came out in 1984, is really the definitive text.

It's the creeping realization that the story you think you are willingly walking into has actually been dictating your actions for longer than you've been alive.

It is the enchanted wood acting as the raw, unfiltered human unconscious.

Which provides this incredibly stark contrast to our next text, Naomi Novik's Uprooted.

If Holdstock gives us a forest that hides human archetypes and reflects our inner minds, Novik gives us a forest that is the monster.

Which perfectly bridges us to the next theme.

This transition from the intimate trauma of the family to the systemic extraction performed by governments and institutions is brilliantly explored in Naomi Novik's Uprooted and R.F. Kuang's Babel.

So the premise of Uprooted relies on a brutal systemic contract.

Agnieszka lives in a village situated on the border of a deeply corrupted, aggressive wilderness known as The Wood.

The village relies entirely on the magical protection of a local wizard called The Dragon, but the cost of this protection is exorbitant.

It fuels their industrial revolution, their military supremacy, and their colonial expansion.

The scholars at Babel believe they are engaging in pure, enlightened linguistic research, but the institution is fundamentally an engine of imperial conquest.

Let me stop you there because the comparison between Uprooted and Babel reveals a terrifying progression.