This book has many of the fairytale elements I love. However, I devoured the book to distract myself, and in turn got distracted from the book, so I'm not sure if I didn't like some of the action scenes because I didn't follow them or the other way around.
I found myself surprised by loving the magic in this story even though it seems like a very soft magic in terms of the rules for how it works, how random it is for what it can and cannot do. I guess it comes down to very craft-full foreshadowing in that the magic never felt Deus-ex-y.
I love me some tree people though.