You nailed my biggest problem with the books. No sooner did Tavi come on the scene than I knew where the series was headed. Not that, in itself, that's enough to toss a series or book into the nyet pile. Sometimes it can be very interesting to see what a good writer can do with the old tropes. The Calderon series does have some good scenes and decent characters, although I think the bad guys are more interesting in many cases. What I did like about the Marats is that they came across as amused by the attitudes of the Alerans; they certainly, at least as I read them, did not exhibit any sense of inferiority to the Alerans. Yes, there were aspects of Aleran culture that they did not get, but I got the feeling that for the Marats the same was true of the Alerans about the Marat culture. I have the latest book but I've had it for three weeks, and even had it when I was spending nights at the hospital with my mother, and still haven't cracked the cover. So, not a must read series for me. Then again, I never finished off the Deryni series by Katherine Kurtz either, and when it first came out I always got the books as soon as they were published.

Hmmm.... you know, I begin to wonder now if the reason I stuck with the Deryni series as long as I did was because my sisters and friends were all agog about them and there was much rejoicing and discussing each time one appeared. Makes me wonder about how much fandom props up otherwise eh series.