This gives Berg a lot of room for innovation. Berg's setting is one of the few devoid of typical fantasy races, unless you count the demons, and it's also one of the few worlds where I don't miss them. They're specifically described as bronze-skinned and dark-haired (meaning that most of the cover pictures are inaccurate, unfortunately). Ezzaria is the kind of gentle forested nation that a lot of fantasy elves live in, but the books don't spend a lot of time there, and its people are not elves.

The Derzhi Empire mostly spans a desert and the countries around it, with outposts in mountains and grasslands and jungles. There's no trace of the normal temperate, castle-dotted, pseudo-English countryside of most fantasy novels. Setting: It might sound cliched, but the setting is anything but. So he has to save Aleksander and most everyone else from a threat that no one else has the ability to fight, without even his magic to aid him. The narrator of all three books is Seyonne, who has been a slave since the first days of conquest and learned to forget his past as a Warden- until he sees a spirit in his new master, Prince Aleksander, that the demons are trying to take possession of. Even the ones left as slaves have been stripped of their sorcery, leaving no way to continue the demon war.

However, the Ezzarians haven't fought for sixteen years at the time this story begins, since their country was conquered by the Derzhi Empire and most of the Ezzarians were killed or sold off as slaves. The fighters work in man-woman pairs, the woman (the Aife) opening a portal into a possessed person's soul and the male Warden going through and forcing the demon out or killing it. They concern the Ezzarians, a group of people who spend their lives in a secret demon war, either actually fighting it or supporting those who do. She has two other books out since the trilogy, but Transformation was her first published. But I can do a detailed review, thanks to my overly crowded with useless details of books I read years ago memory.īrief Summary: Transformation, Revelation, and Restoration are the three books of the Rai-kirah saga, by Carol Berg, a relatively new author. Unfortunately, I can't quote from these books to show you how wonderful they are, because I don't have them with me at the moment. I've never done a proper review of these, more like a few 'OMG!squee' posts.

Transformation by carol berg