Proceed With Caution:
This book contains gore.
The Basics:
Mari's Mistake takes us all the way back to the beginning of the series with Mari and Lauren washing up on the beach. Instead of heading into the jungle, we go to the other end of the beach where Mari resonates with T'chai right before he gets gutted by a sky-claw. Fast forward a few months and we're caught up with the rest of the books, but this couple is still not doing well.
My Thoughts:
I feel like the whole series has been building up to Mari's Mistake. We've known from the beginning that something has gone very wrong for this couple after they had their resonance turned off so that T'chai could heal. It's been a long time coming, and I was eager to finally find out what happened and how it's going to get fixed. It was interesting, but I was also distracted by the mechanics of it all and how things weren't exactly matching up in my brain.
Mari's Mistake shows us exactly what happened when Veronica tried to heal T'chai. Apparently, his khui wasn't healing him because it was too busy resonating to Mari, which makes no sense. The main purpose of the khui is to keep you healthy. It heals you when something is ailing, and then it nudges along procreation. We already know that you can't resonate if you're unable to conceive, and meanwhile the khui will work to correct the problem. T'chai was dying! His khui should have been working overtime to keep him from dying! Perhaps it was because he was already resonating? But khuis don't strike me as dumb; it would have known to switch to health mode.
I also didn't understand why Mari's khui was sending her signals that T'chai's touch was bad or wrong. Basically, she could not stand his touch. But...other sa-khui and even humans have taken pleasure mates and have never complained about not liking someone's touch just because they weren't their resonance mate. Again, perhaps, this was because they had been resonating and it still thought it had a mate and it wasn't T'chai? Talking to Maylak kind of made it make more sense, but it still wasn't adding up for me.
Don't get me wrong, I did like Mari's Mistake overall. It was very different than the other books and gave us a new look into khui and resonance, as well as some other little details. And there's some larger surprises along the way which were more interesting than our main couple, and I do believe that was on purpose, since Mari and T'chai weren't the most exciting couple due to the heavy subject matter.