Several years after Blackfoot, Peter starts at the University of Mechanics and Magic. He’s convinced of his own cleverness and cannot understand why one of his new classmates, Miss Glenna Stoneflange, does not want to work with him.

Because Peter ends up messing around with time-travel, there are a couple of scenes from his future in the previous books. It’s interesting getting those moments again from Peter’s perspective and fitting the puzzle pieces of his story together.

I also felt invested in his journey even though he spends a lot of time being arrogant and oblivious to how his actions affect others, because I knew that there must be a significant change up ahead. And even before that realisation, even when Peter still feels justified, the narrative is not blind to his faults.

I found the way Peter’s dawning realisation is handled unexpectedly satisfying. His mistakes and their consequences are not dismissed, not trivialised, and apologising doesn’t magically make things right; he has to live with some of his mistakes. And maybe being a better person will take a lot of hard work, but he’s capable of that, he has the opportunity of that; he’s not just the sum of his mistakes. There’s something very hopeful about that.

Peter had once thought that he was a reasonably satisfactory person. He had been quite content in the conviction -- as he had been in the conviction that he did not make mistakes when it came to logic, magic or mechanics. The only mistakes he made, as he had thought, were those carefully calculated ones in his experiments.
Perhaps he was more akin to his project in their experimental stage than the finished product: a series of considered trials and errors that took him ever close to the finished project -- a series of considered trials and errors without which the final product could never exist.

I also really enjoyed seeing more of Poly and Luck (from Spindle), and getting to know Glenna. ( )