The Soul Weaver by Carol Berg
I should preface this with pointing out that I read about 100 pages at the car repair shop, waiting to find out if I'd be able to take the car home today, and read most of the rest today when not dealing with that, finances, or what to do about work if I don't have the car back before I go to work tomorrow.
My main thought is this: How did a series about a "normal" 30-something year old woman who lost everything due to fantasy plotlines happening and then got dragged into it all again once she had a life again a decade later turn into a Young Coming of Age Hero With Special Powers and A Special Destiny series?
So, the first book was very firmly Seri's story. How she lost everything, what she did with her life after that, and then all the fantasy characters and plots coming to drag her back in, and how she dealt with it, resulting in a ray of hope for her. It also had heavy themes of forgiveness and acceptance and realizing that your biases clouded your judgement. A lot of the plot was fairly typical of fantasy, but the way it was told made it stand out.
The second book split the story between Seri, Karon, and Gerick. It had some of the themes again, and almost erased the lines between good and evil. It was a lot less focused on Seri, and most of the character exploration and development was focused on Gerick, but it still seemed to be firmly about giving Seri her family back.
Here, Seri is gone from all but the first and last hundred pages, and is chiefly there in the role of Karon's wife and Gerick's mother. I'm largely neutral on Karon. His situation is interesting, but he evokes no real opinions from me. My strongest opinion on him is iration that we never got to see him and Seri work through their problems from before. Gerick fares better with me because no one-including him-knows if he's good or evil at any given moment, and he's messed up and confused straight to his core. Most view him as the villain, not the hero, and they hasve justifiable reasons for doing so. It's an interesting twist on the Coming of Age fantasy hero concept, but that isn't what I signed on for.
The book also felt kind of disjointed, almost as if Berg was more worried about getting it all in there than tying it together. All this is not to say that the book is bad, or that I won't be finishing the series. It was just a bit of a letdown after the first two books.
I also don't see how any of this could begin to lead to anything resembling a happy ending for Seri. I say this at least partly because of how the other fantasy series I started at the same time earlier this year ended, and how some of it seemed unnecessarily cruel to the heroine.