Elena Likes Books

I read an electronic ARC of this book thanks to NetGalley.com.The final book in the trilogy, this novel follows Moirin and her husband Bao as they embark on a quest to retrieve Raphael de Mereliot and the crown prince, Thierry, from an ill-fated expedition in the newly-encountered land of Terra Nova. At stake is the realm of Terre d'Ange, the happiness of the young dauphin, Desiree, and, unknown to the travelers, the fate of Terra Nova itself.First and foremost, I must confess that I liked this trilogy much less than the previous two. I found Moirin to be a much, much less compelling protagonist than those who came before her. She just kind of drifts around following her destiny and extricating herself from tricky situations by means of making friends and asking her gods for help. There is very little cleverness or cunning in Moirin, and I liked her less for it.However, Jacqueline Carey is one of the few authors I read for world and plot in addition to character. She writes the most vivid worlds and creates some of the most intricate but still reasonably fast-moving plots of any author I've encountered. So I can forgive her for a less-than-amazing character.The plot of this novel was much more straightforward than some of her previous ones, but still compelling. While I was successfully able to predict the general progression of events for nearly the entire book, certain things unfolded in slightly different ways from what I expected, and there were certainly surprising elements thrown in.What really made this book great for me, however, was the depiction of Terra Nova (basically Central America). The setting and cultures that Moirin encounters on her journey deep into the continent are vividly and lovingly drawn, and some of my favorite characters in the book were the ones Moirin meets in Terra Nova (and also Balthazar Shahrizai