Across the Great Barrier

Across the Great Barrier (2011) Patricia C. Wrede

Eff Rothmer has returned to Mill City, and much to her chagrin, people are calling her a hero, for the work she did in coming up with a way to destroy the mirror bug infestation.

BEING A HEROINE IS NOWHERE NEAR THE FUN FOLKS MAKE IT OUT TO be. Oh, it’s nice enough at first, when everybody is offering congratulations and making a fuss, but that doesn’t last long. And when the thing they’re congratulating you for is getting rid of a bunch of bugs, which you didn’t do all by your own self anyway, it feels pretty silly. Not to mention that it annoys the other people who ought to have come in for some of the credit.

One of the interesting things is seeing Lan be jealous of Eff. Lan was used to being the center of attention, what with being a double seventh son, and it was good for both him and Eff. Especially since Eff is still trying to deal with her fear of her own magic, assuming that she would do wrong or evil.

It was also good in this story to Eff realize on her own that her magic was not evil, and to finally start to do the work she needed to, to control her own magic.

We also see Eff growing up and becoming an actual adult.

I could be happy with him, if I worked at it, and it wasn’t like I had a lot of other suitors banging at our door.

But I wasn’t sure I wanted to work at being happy with Roger. I didn’t want to get married just because most of my sisters had.

But what I loved best is that–as with the previous story–there is lots of science and natural history and the basics of good science.

“Gathering base data is just as important as making entirely new observations. More important, sometimes; you can’t tell whether something’s changed if you don’t know what it was like to begin with.”

It’s a lovely series, and I enjoyed it much this time around as I did before.
Rating: 8.5/10

Publisher: Scholastic Press

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