This is not a bad read, just disappointing. Almost the entire story is based upon a character from the previous book, and is the weakest installment of the series in my opinion. If you want to read more about Maelen, you won't get it here. Still, Andre Norton's writing is better than so much of the pablum offered in the SciFi/fantasy genre. Mildly recommended if you want to finish the series. ( )

Read it as a kid, but remember really liking it. ( )

Very poor. A large part of the problem is that Farree, who is the viewpoint character throughout, has no idea what's going on most of the time. In the beginning, Krip (called Vorlund half the time, with no pattern I could discern), Maelen, and a Zacathan ally named Zonor are regularly making cryptic comments which neither Farree nor we, the readers, understand - and no explanation is ever given. Plus Farree is constantly being hooked by pheromones, enemy mind-calls, friends trying to get through the block in his mind, random visions/dreams/something...so half the time he doesn't know whether he's awake or dreaming again, he's constantly running off in one direction or another without knowing where he's going or why, and even when he's at his most stable there's things going on around him that he doesn't understand and doesn't bother to try (so we the readers are forced to be just as ignorant). And if iron burns him, why didn't it ever do so before? Don't tell me he never encountered it in the Limits, if it's common enough that ship skins are made of some iron-containing alloy. And...yeah. The typos also continue, to the point where I truly didn't understand what it meant to say several times (which meant I spent time reading over the line and trying to think what it might have been - good way to throw me totally out of the story). Poorly thought out plot - ooh, what if winged Farree is really a fairy (I just now figured out why all his people look at him weird when he claims that's his name), and the Faerie are actually aliens who used to be on Earth and have been running away ever since from the spread of mankind. Yeah. Cute idea, but it needed a _lot_ more work to be an actual functional story. Bye-bye, books. ( )