Back before I had to be careful to avoid horder status, I would peruse the book section of my local thrift stores and pick up anything with an interesting cover. That's how I ended up with three copies of The Summer Tree. 
 Despite circling the book in this way for a few years, it kept getting deprioritized for reading because, as the back cover puts it, it's "an epic adventure written in the rich tradition of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings." Has a less appealing sentence ever been written? 
 Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy having read that sort of high fantasy. The problem is that I don't often enjoy the actual reading of it, in the present tense. I love the ideas, I love learning the lore, but it takes itself too seriously. It's too pretentious. 
 And The Summer Tree does fall into that trap, but at least it's only for 323 pages. I can endure anything for 323 pages. 
 Despite the claim that the book is like Lord of the Rings, I found it reminded me much more of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time. Or, perhaps, it would be more proper to say that The Wheel of Time reminded me, retroactively, of The Summer Tree, now that I look up the publication dates. I wouldn't call plagiarism, but some similarities are rather striking at times. 
 The tone is a bit of a weird mix. This is a portal fantasy, so you have the high fantasy thees and thous and highfalutin language, and then you get the informal modern speech of the protagonists. It might possibly be funny if the trope hadn't already been done to death and the rest of the book didn't take itself so seriously. But as it was, it just felt awkward and jarring. It's hard to see what Kay might have done differently, though, once he'd locked himself into the portal plot. I think the lesson here is to just avoid the portal plot. 
 I did have a rough time getting into the book. Part of that might be that I was in a car (and therefore had to keep taking breaks to avoid tossing my cookies all about), part might be that I was just coming down off the very different writing of We Were Liars by E. Lockhart. Either way, the first fifty or so pages felt like real drudgery. Perhaps it's no coincidence that these take place in the "real world" (which, in this case, is Toronto). After that, however, I found that the characters grew on me. I was invested in them (well, some of them - enough of them). 
 It helped that the pacing is consistent, with the exposition mingled with action. Given just how much exposition had to be covered (and covered again, as the protagonists are rarely together and must learn the backstory separately), that's pretty impressive. 
 My big complaint about the book is its treatment of women. Of the four named women who are dead before the start of the story, three died for men (one to stop her lover from doing more evil, one out of grief because her loved died, and the third out of grief/shame because her lover was exiled). The fourth's only function in the story is to be dead so that a male character can have an angsty backstory. 
 Of the living women, we have a princess and future queen whose only role in the plot is to be tricked into sex in a scene played for comedy. We also have one of the five "real world" characters whose only role seems to be to get kidnapped and tortured by having her body (and, specifically, her nipples) pinched (SPOILERS: (view spoiler)[and then be raped (hide spoiler)]). 
 There are a handful of other female characters, but their roles are nearly as passive. They do a few things, make a few decisions, but it is the men who go out and have adventures and fight the baddies and carouse. I lost track of all the women the main male characters have sex with, but the only female characters getting any action are coerced into it. 
 And it just seems so... unnecessary. What is the point of pushing women to the sidelines like this? Of denying them agency and personality? Of raping and killing them, over and over again, to serve the plot? Maybe these books are a product of their time, or maybe the fantasy genre's conventions make these nasty attitudes difficult to see and avoid. I don't know, but it's frustrating and unappealing to see authors view people like me as not really human, and certainly not capable of being interesting. We are sprinkled in because even Tolkien couldn't write a world that is completely free of women, but we are the mothers, the lovers, the unruly daughters - our pain matters only insofar as it causes men pain, our struggles matter only insofar as they further men's interests, our agency matters only insofar as it threatens men. It's frustrating, and it's disappointing. 
 I will read the second book in the trilogy, and I'll give Kay a chance to fix his thoughtless parroting of tropes when it comes to his female characters. But every book I read like this makes me less inclined to bother with male fantasy authors in future. We can do better.