After reading the Kindle sample of the first chapter of Uprooted, I was intensely absorbed. It pulled me right in to it's fairytale world and showed no signs of letting go, so I bought the paperback, and to my delight it had beautiful artwork on the cover with an enchanting look to it. And for the first half, Uprooted is just what I expected: an enchanting fairytale reminiscent of old Disney movies like Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, while adding a darker style in the vain of the Grimm tales. The Dragon is a wonderfully complex character that is both intimidating and very emotionally human. He's hard and cold, but can't hide a softer, weaker side of human nature which I find fascinating and fresh. Nobody in Uprooted is perfect, and that point is driven home throughout. Novik's characters are as human as can be. After Agnieszka is taken by the Dragon, their relationship begins to unfold as she finds out why she's really locked away in his tower and why he took her. The ever looming Wood is a corrupt disease-like forest full of evil trees and monsters that infect the land inch by inch like a creeping plague. But all this whimsy and mystery clears up at the half way mark, and politics, war, violence, and battle become the focal points of the story. It becomes a slog that I was pushing to get through, having lost all interest once the fighting broke out. When the magic and novelty of the fairytale beginnings wears off, we're left with very basic half-baked politics and pretty unexciting, long-winded battle scenes. All of this comes to a close in a pretty bizarre and whacky way that left me wondering what just happened. And the final blow is an ending that I felt was entirely unsatisfying not only because it's not what I was led to believe and was really hoping for, but because there's no indication of a sequel to make it so. Naomi Novik is a wonderfully talented author, but I feel that Uprooted loses all it's charm in the early chapters and becomes a by-the-numbers teen action fantasy.