books 2008: Path of Blood, by Diana Pharaoh Francis
I have to admit, I'm a little disappointed with this one. Okay, so Reisil saves the world, and keeps her bird, and has a happy baby, and everyone loves her because she's the hero. But EVERY OTHER DAMN CHARACTER gets screwed. Sodur becomes a nakula; Juhrnus becomes a plague healer (not a bad deal overall, but he's not Juhrnus anymore, not really); Metyein gets tortured and then BEHEADED by his best friend, when Metyein was possibly the best character in the book; Soka has to live with the fact that he had to kill Metyein; Ceriba gets raped and tortured AGAIN, only she dies this time; Baku gets blown up, and Yohuac gets disemboweled and then gets to spend the rest of Reisil's natural life as a ghost. WTF? Francis should have found a better damn way to fix that. I never really bought Reisil and Yohuac's undying love to begin with; he just sort of popped up randomly midway through book 2, and she didn't really seem to notice him until he kissed her at the end of book 2, and then all of sudden beginning of book 3 she feels for him what she's never felt for any other man. And now he's a ghost, and they'll never be able to have any other children or even sex, and Reisil's a young woman. It's kind of a crappy ending, really. And the way that the world got saved, with the Lady having to pull back from Kodu Riik, was kind of lame--now it's just going to be like every other magical world in a fantasy novel. And we never had explained where the plague healers even come from--my theory is that, when the plague hits a person with magical talent, the plague's magic and the person's magic fuse so the person becomes a plague healer. But that's not clear at all, and you'd think more plague healers would be running around if that were the case. For that matter, where did the plague even come from? We got an explanation about the nokulas that made sense--the magic in Mysane Kosk wanted to BE something, and so it attached to any living thing that came near and transformed it--but where did the plague come from? It's obviously a magical plague, but no explanation. Oh, and where did Reisil's parents end up? I feel frustrated that I poured so much energy into reading these books and the ending was so unsatisfying. They were definitely enjoyable to read, and fun, but I'm not really happy.