Just Finished Reading Tad Williams' Shadowheart

I just finished reading the book Shadowheart by Tad Williams, which is the concluding volume to the four-part Shadowmarch fantasy series.  This was a rather difficult series for me to get through because, although I normally expect fantasy series to contain a reasonable portion of magic and the supernatural (hence the name "fantasy"), Shadowmarch is overwhelmingly loaded with it.  As such, it was difficult to read it while keeping at least one foot set in reality.  Other writers like George R.R. Martin, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Daniel Abraham seem to realize this need to primarily base the story line in some semblance of reality in order to make the occasional "magic" seem more special.  But when it's all out of the ordinary, at least for me, the reader's mind gets numbed to it after a while.  Nevertheless, in Shadowheart, Mr. Williams does manage to tie up all of the threads he had loosened earlier in the series, and the ending is quite satisfactory with the bad guys getting their comeuppances and the heroes and heroines largely receiving happy endings...if they weren't killed off earlier, that is.  Naturally, I'm not telling what happened since I want you to try this series out for yourself...and for you to give your own feedback to it...

I will give Tad Williams the credit for having the self-discipline, apparently lacking in Robert Jordan in his The Wheel of Time series and George R.R. Martin in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, to limit the scope of his characters and story.  I think there must be a temptation in fantasy fiction writing to want to keeping on creating and creating within your own devised "world"...but for readers this can get to get very cumbersome to keep up with.  With the Shadowmarch series, the core characters remain the same throughout...with the greatest focus given to the two preeminent ones: Princess Brienny and her twin brother Prince Barrick.  I'd also like to give Williams kudos for his well-done character development.  It's obvious to me that he put a lot of himself into writing this series, which can put the reader into a kind of funk in some of the tediously depressing sections but still represents a very interesting story with compelling protagonists (and very nasty villains)...