The rating chosen for this review reflects my extreme disappointment with this volume in particular and, because this concludes a trilogy, with the series as a whole.

As with the others, it is a bit of a travelogue. Here we see the Elven land of Irriyan and travel on the last leg of the journey to Seer's Keep, the destination for the three children from our world since book 1. None of the locations are particularly well evoked although the sequence when Carrie, Craig and yet another new character, Nyssa, travel by sea is more well described, and I liked the friendly sea orcs. As usual, nothing goes smoothly and the White Mage, who is working for the opposition, although only Carrie will accept this, sabotages things so that Carrie is separated from the others. Craig eventually ends up in Mordican, where we finally find out who the Grimthane is - rather an anti-climax, and seems set to take over and inflict his idea of progress on what he views with hatred as a backward land and inhabitants. As with book 2, there's a big environmental message about the despoliation of the natural world on our Earth.

Carrie is in denial about having powers which will lead her to join the ranks of the seers and mages, and in what I found a particularly daft scene, lashes out in anger, killing the hawk which is hosting the spirit of Kadmon, the ambivalent mage who has been following her to protect her, and also cutting her off from a couple of minor characters who have also been helpful. When she at last reaches the Keep, it is a total non event, with the place not even described; suddenly she has been there for a while, still battling her destiny. Then she, for no very good reason, decides to go for it after all.

Meanwhile, we've seen that the remaining Earth boy, Roderick, who selflessly took Craig's place at the end of book 2 and has now been in a dungeon for months, finally escapes with the aid of friends, and decides to remain in the Grimthane's/Craig's city, to help the downtrodden race of goblins, unlikely though it seems he can evade recapture. Other minor characters who have scarcely risen above the level of cardboard cutouts, turn up at the Keep at the very end to help Carrie when it turns out the seers are ancient and have been too power grabbing to recruit successors - but in the end suddenly relinquish it in favour of Carrie. And Craig declares he will go to war against the rest of Llandor with the bombs and guns he will create, with his knowledge of gunpowder except - big clanger - the Grimthane already has a Victorian inventor who could have already done all that and would be better equipped to put into practice knowledge that in Craig's case is literally textbook.

We've been told all along that Craig loves computer games and reading fantasy novels, so how is this boy who has never made anything practical in his whole life suddenly going to reinvent the internal combustion engine and all the rest of it? The notion that the enemy were after them for the knowledge in Craig's head was never very convincing, and at the end of the series is totally blown out of the water by this casual revelation of the Victorian engineer who has already introduced 19th century type factories! The Grimthane never needed Craig: he already has someone who could develop firearms and probably canon, and could put to good use the textbooks the children brought with them, though in theory Kadmon took those to Seers' Keep.

The thing that I really found a total letdown though is the complete anticlimax at the very end. Carrie scries in the pool, supposedly to see where she will need to go when she is trained, to maintain the energy web that sustains Llandor. Instead, she sees the young people with talent whom the seers have ignored. Then her friends turn up and the chief seer capitulates and says she's right. And that's it - we never see if Carrie and some of the others develop powers, or find out if Craig and his Grimthane ally are beaten.

Maybe there was going to be another trilogy to answer that question, but I consider these three books to have been outrageous padding if so. Something that should have been the starting point of the fight against the enemy - reaching the Keep - is the hastily sketched ending. I suppose it can be argued that each of the three discovered their role the hard way rather than by being told, but having had to endure endless belly aching from Craig about Llandor and childish bickering from most of the other characters, plus the aggravating overuse of adverbs every time someone speaks, or umpteen substitutes for the word said, for three whole books, I feel that the reader deserves more than this. ( )