Another great installment in the series. I wasnt down with everything in the book (did giant bugs really need misogynistic gender roles?) but I love all the characters and the emotional aspects of the story are very effective. I liked seeing a bit more of Dairine and her relationship with her wizardry, and also found a lot of funny parts even with the threats the characters are facing. Also Nita is a badass and its great.

My childhood diary informs me that I sobbed for an hour over this in 2005 ( )

My least favorite in the series when I first read it. Now *shrugs* I really like it. Not sure if the rewrite fixed something I was hinky about, or if the first time I read it I did so with a migraine, but it's pretty damn awesome. ( )

Possibly the most epic and whirlwind Young Wizards book yet.

The strange goings-on in the universe are coming to a head. Entropy seems to be forcing space to expand at a dangerous rate, and a weird dark entity is being spotted in the far reaches of the galaxy. The Lone Power is obviously up to something...but what?

Worst of all, the expansion is causing Senior wizards everywhere to lose their powers...and eventually their memories. Without their advice and experience, it literally is up to the "young" wizards to save the universe.

The book encompasses an amazing, riotous, breathtaking intergalactic quest that combines characters from almost all the previous books; from young Irish rebel Ronan, to the whale wizard S'reee, to innocent and canny Darryl, to the memorable alien wizards Sker'ret, Filif, and Roshaun from the previous book. Together with Nita, Dairine, Kit, and Ponch, they will spread out across the galaxy, to investigate a faraway planet populated by a hive culture of aliens that may hide the key to saving the world at its heart. Phasing effortlessly from humor, to relationships, to magic, to science, to battles and settings epic in scope, this book truly shows off the entire scale that makes this one of the most brilliant series I've ever read. ( )

giving 5 out of 5. Great read Good story. Just please stop with adding more people that are wizards. ( )

I really enjoyed this addition to the series. It was significantly longer than all the previous books so far (although it looks like the rest of them are this long, as well) and it gave me a little bit of a book hangover, which was a welcome relief since I wasn't as impressed with the previous two installments.

This book brings together a lot of the characters from various earlier books in the series for one huge, high-stakes adventure that I think will be hard to top. As far as complaints, my main issue was that the writing wasn't 100% spot on. There were several places that I noticed Duane using the same word twice in either the same sentence or two sentences back-to-back. It just made things kind of clunky and I felt it could have been edited better. I was also a little disappointed in an odd way with something that happened toward the end. One of our main characters effectively sacrifices himself in order to save the day, but then they still end up saving him somehow. I was kind of irked by that, because it was straight up stated by one of the characters that in order for the thing that needed to happen to happen, this person would die. It took away from the significance of the act that they saved him, and Duane killed off a character in Book 1 that I liked far more than this one, so I didn't see the point. ( )