Author: Sara Douglass
Published: 2001
Too much daddy issues.
It actually started out pretty good. There was some interesting character development in some places, this weird forest and weird old guys that lived there. There was at some point this massive storm and it wiped out a huge chunk of main character's army (he was a general or made a general, cliche). He had to save special woman, and they went into a cave where more weird stuff happened (?? Pretty sure they were all naked for a while; I dunno. I hope I'm remembering the right book). Genuinely interesting. But of course, the main character is a chosen one
type, and he has an evil villain after him for some reason I don't remember. Something something, he didn't know his father so he doesn't know the song of his people (that's not a joke, that's literally the plot).
After about the third or fourth time with the 'he can't sing because he daddy didn't teach him' (yet he still managed to anyway and ran off the big baddy) I had had enough. Whoops. Oh well.