Harbinger – Jane Lindskold

“Library of the Sapphire Wind” (and its second half, “The Aurora Borealis Bridge”) is a competent fantasy novel - written by an author who has written much-better-than-competent novels in the past. It reads well enough to be worth reading and worth finishing, but the story is very mechanical: Three women from our world are summoned to another world (where magic works and the people are all a bit theriomorphic) to aid three questers in what turns out to be an effort to unite three parts of a magic device…

What differentiates the novel is the summoned humans are women in their fifties, sixties, and seventies (one each), who bring lifetimes of experience to the table, rather than the usual outstanding physical abilities or skills. That helped.