I read two books by the author Naomi Novik last month: Uprooted and Spinning Silver. Both books share the theme of female agency, where women claim power and make choices that reflect their own judgment, not society’s. There are three main female characters across the two books, but Novik’s romantic arcs for these women reveal something interesting about what their choices rest on. All three end up with men who initially see them as property, but the reasons they each choose their man differ. I’d like to explore those differences, and what they reveal about the limits of Novik’s commitment to her own theme: female agency alone does not guarantee romantic fulfillment; only agency recognized by an equal produces love.
Uprooted: The Servant & The Wizard
In Uprooted, a wizard named The Dragon isolates himself on the frontier of a kingdom in order to fight a cursed wood that threatens to destroy all humanity. Every ten years, he conscripts a seventeen-year-old girl from the nearby villages to act as his servant. The novel’s narrator, Agnieszka, is the latest girl he’s taken.
Agnieszka turns out to be a powerful wizard, though her power differs from his. The Dragon is an academic who learns spells from books; she’s a natural magician who feels her way through a spell. At first, the Dragon sees her as clumsy and incompetent: she can barely serve dinner without disaster and she struggles with basic spells. Then she discovers in his library a “useless” book written by an eccentric female wizard, and the woman’s words resonate with the way Agnieszka experiences magic. Soon, she learns to channel her powers in ways the Dragon can’t understand.
Her power disturbs him because it doesn’t fit his expectations, but Agnieszka is equally unsettled. Growing up, she and her friends dreaded the day the Dragon would choose one of them, and they heard and spread depraved rumors of what happened to the girls he selected. But locked in his tower, Agnieszka discovers the truth: the Dragon is not a monster. He’s a handsome, centuries-old man who is austere, disciplined, and curmudgeonly, but he’s also devoted his life to keeping the kingdom (and the people in it) safe from the horrors of the wood.
Their admiration reaches a breaking point during a magical test. She conjures a weak illusion of a rose. When he shows her how to improve it, she spontaneously combines her magic with his, and with their magic entwined, the rose grows to become a living garden that consumes the library. The experience of her magic mixing with his is intimate, and Agnieszka throws herself at the Dragon so that they might, right there on the floor, bring the enchantment to a climax. After some deep kissing and heavy petting, the Dragon puts a stop to it. He ends the contact, storms off, and ignores her for weeks, a difficult punishment in a locked tower.
The novel’s larger plot—the war against the cursed wood—becomes the proving ground for the romance. Each display of her powers shifts his perception of her. He begins to respect Agnieszka, and against his will, to desire her.
The Dragon is a dedicated, single-minded servant to a cause, and Agnieszka finds his discipline impressive, even if it unsettles her. But the turning point comes during the conjuring scene. When he joins his magic with hers, he doesn’t just perform a spell from a book; he moves beyond his surprise at her abilities to amplify what they both can do. In that moment, that dance of their skills, she feels truly seen and desired. She throws herself at him not despite his aloofness, but because his recognition of her power has made desire inevitable.
After touching her magic for himself, the Dragon can no longer deny what he sees and feels. He accepts his mistake, slowly, begrudgingly, but also genuinely. He recognizes Agnieszka as a powerful person with her own agency. She, in turn, has come to admire his discipline and decency. Their romance works because it’s rooted in mutual recognition: each has grown to see the other’s worth. When that recognition lands, desire follows naturally, making their happily-ever-after feel earned rather than forced.
Spinning Silver: The Moneylender & The Ice King
In Spinning Silver, Novik tells a different fairy tale, one where the romance emerges from something colder and more deliberate: recognition between two sovereign minds.
Miryem, the Jewish daughter of a timid moneylender, saves her starving family by forcibly collecting on the debts owed to her father. She eventually collects enough silver to bring it to the city where she exchanges it for gold. When she boasts of her ability to convert silver to gold, her claim draws the attention of the Staryk king, a creature of ice whose people prize gold because it carries heat from the human world into their frozen realm. He tests her abilities three times, and when she succeeds, he fulfills his promise and makes her his queen, though at first the title amounts to little more than captivity in a glass mountain, where her touch alone turns silver to gold for his kingdom (of course, every converted coin steals the heat from the human world, causing blizzards that destroy crops and causing summers to become winters).
Like the Dragon in Uprooted, the Staryk king initially treats Miryem as an instrument. Yet there is a crucial difference in the speed of his perception. Where the Dragon resists Agnieszka’s power, the Staryk recognizes Miryem’s immediately. He may intend to use her gift, but he never mistakes her for being powerless.
Just as important, Miryem discovers that the Staryk world operates according to a strict moral logic of bargains kept and debts honored. What first appears monstrous is gradually reframed: the king brings winter not out of cruelty but as a desperate strategy to defeat a fire demon who is consuming both their worlds. By causing winter in her world, he hopes to protect his own. His severe choices are not chaotic whims but rational order; not appetite for her world’s destruction, but a fierce and noble duty. As a moneylender who has learned the cost of broken promises, Miryem understands this language instinctively.
Recognition deepens into reciprocity when Miryem begins to see herself not as a prisoner but as a queen responsible for the survival of her people. The shift is completed when she risks herself for the Staryk realm, putting her life on the line to fight the fire demon. In the king’s eyes, she ceases to be merely a clever mortal and becomes instead a true counterpart, someone capable of sharing the burdens of sovereignty.
Desire in Spinning Silver does not arrive as a blaze but as a thaw. Novik signals it through restraint rather than declaration, most clearly after the defeat of the fire demon:
He reached down and caught me by the waist and lifted me out onto the bank… He stood there holding me by the waist a moment longer… Then he turned back and seized both my hands in his… and for an instant, I thought he would—
Physical contact is rare in the novel, which makes it narratively expensive. When the king continues holding Miryem past necessity, the gesture reads as reluctance to let her go. Even more telling is the unfinished sentence, an em dash whose interruption mirrors the emotional discipline governing their relationship. Desire exists between them, but both are too controlled, too sovereign, to indulge it prematurely.
The romance becomes unmistakable after the crisis passes. Miryem demands that he court her by her culture’s rules, for she had made “a promise between me and my people, that my children would still be Israel no matter where they lived.” A man who claimed to love her would have to submit to that demand for “I wouldn’t hold myself that cheap, to marry a man who’d love me less than everything else he had, even if what he had was a winter kingdom.”
Their marriage follows Jewish tradition, beneath the canopy, with shared wine and the breaking of the glass. The scene quietly resolves the question that structured their relationship from the beginning: not whether they could grow to admire one another, but whether each could make room for the other’s world.
As with Agnieszka and the Dragon, love emerges from mutual recognition. Yet where Agnieszka’s romance ignites in the shock of shared magic, Miryem’s is forged through judgment, discipline, and deliberate choice. It feels less like surrender than alliance, a union of equals.
Spinning Silver: The Lady & The Tsar
Unlike Uprooted, which is told exclusively from Agnieszka’s point of view, Spinning Silver has several POV characters. Miryem is one; Irina, the daughter of a nearly broke nobleman, is another. The Staryk silver that Miryem transforms into gold to pass the ice king’s tests achieves that conversion by being formed into beautiful silver jewelry that the duke purchases in order to persuade the Tsar to marry his plain-looking daughter. Unbeknown to the duke, the jewelry casts a magical charm that causes all who look upon Irina to marvel at her beauty and grace.
All, that is, but the Tsar, who sees her so clearly that he is obsessed with drawing her portrait and showing it to others to make sure they see what he sees. When he thrusts one of his drawings at her, she is caught by his skill: “It was an ordinary unbeautiful face, but it was certainly mine and no other’s, though there were only a handful of lines on the page.”
He also recognizes her intelligence, though he sees it as a bore and bemoans having a wife who talks to him of taxes and harvest numbers the way his economic advisors do, and he envisions a future where he is beset by nerds in the councilroom and in the bedroom.
If love grows from mutual recognition, then the Tsar’s inability to see Irina as other than she is, and his frustration at not finding her as beautiful and charming as everyone else does, is a humorous play on the theme.
The recognition of being other than what others see goes both ways, for the Tsar is not the handsome, young, fashion-devoted ruler that others believe him to be, but a person who has been enslaved to a fire demon, a man who feeds innocent people to the flame in order to prevent the demon from lashing him with its fire. His love for clothes? It’s not sartorial; it’s because the demon whips him so horribly that his clothes literally burn off him most nights.
Irina sees this, sees where the Tsar’s cruelty comes from, and sees the trauma he lives with.
But the recognition of each other’s reality is not enough.
Nor is desire.
Whatever else he might be, the Tsar is undoubtedly beautiful. Even as a young girl visiting the boy emperor’s castle for his coronation, she recognized his “beautiful green eyes”. Years later, seeing him again, she says, “He’d been sixteen then, tall and full-grown and even more beautiful, with his black hair and light eyes that looked like jewels shining out of his Tatar-dark skin, and his mouth full of even white teeth, and with the crown and his golden robes he might have been a statue, or a saint.” Later, after they married and his demon has revealed itself to her, and not just its existence, but its terrible way of treating him, Irina and the Tsar are forced by circumstance to sleep in bed together as man and wife for the first time:
I realized he meant to have me after all. I couldn't think; I was blank as a page. There were four servants outside listening: if I said no, if I said not yet, if they heard me—and then his hand bunched my gown and drew the fine linen of it up over my thighs, and his fingers trailed over my skin. It made me jump, an involuntary shiver, and my cheeks went painfully red and hot.
She ends up pushing him away from her, and they playact the sound of their lovemaking to trick the servants (he weeps through most of it, rejected, while she bounces the bed and makes womanly moans), but the next morning, she thinks back on the moment before she shoved him away:
I forced myself to eat, keeping my eyes downcast so as not to look at him in his luxuriously embroidered dressing gown, his hands and his mouth...I kept remembering his fingers on my thigh, and my ring [made from Staryk silver] wouldn't swallow up that heat. He demanded a bath, and I had to endure that...two serving girls washed him while I tried not watch their hands moving over his body, tried not to feel something like jealousy. I wasn't jealous over him, but over what he'd made me feel, that stirring that should have belonged to a man I would have *let* touch me: a man who *wanted* to touch me, who could really be my husband. I wanted that shiver along my leg to be a gift I'd never expected; I wanted to be able to look at him in his bath and blush and be *glad* for it.
There is mutual recognition here: she sees him for his cruelty, his victimhood, and his beauty. He sees her plainness and her intelligence. It’s not until the end that he sees something more, when she uses her intelligence to slay the fire demon and free him from its grip forever:
The tsar was holding her hands against his chest, the [Staryk] ring on his finger gleaming pale silver like the tears running in silver lines down his cheeks; he was gazing down at her with eyes shining jewel-green, as though she were the most beautiful thing in the world.
Love comes over him, finally, when he sees her as the others do: the most beautiful thing in the world.
But that’s where Irina’s story ends. Novik does not return to her point-of-view to reveal whether Irina feels anything beyond pity for her husband. She has everything—mutual recognition, real desire, and genuine accomplishment—yet by refusing access to her interiority at this crucial moment, Novik denies her the narrative space to choose whether recognition and desire are enough.
Because of that choice, Irina’s arc and Novik’s exploration of the theme feel incomplete.
The Pattern & Its Exception
Naomi Novik’s fair tale novels reveal a strong insight about love: mutual recognition matters. When it precedes and anchors desire, as it does in Agnieszka’s story, then the romance is earned. When it exists beyond desire, as it does for Miryem and the Staryk, the romance is still earned; it just works differently.
But when Novik denies us access to whether Irina ends up seeing her husband as anything other than a poor, pitiful victim of a horribly cruel curse, the romance arc fails. Yes, the tsar has come around to, in his way, loving his wife (as a beautiful thing), but the tsarina chose to fight for the safety and stability of her realm and all the people in it.
Her arc ends not with romance, but with political power and stability. That’s a real achievement, and one worth having. But Novik structured a thematic question about what makes love earned, and then refused to answer it when the answer got uncomfortable. By denying us access to Irina’s interiority at the moment of resolution, Novik sidesteps the very question her first two arcs posed: Can mutual recognition produce love? With Irina, we never get to know.