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My son and I finished the last 3 or 4 chapters tonight because we were excited to find out what happened.

This little snippet really got to me as I was reading it.

"When she found courage to look back at the Last Magician, his eyes were on her. "You will help?" Carrie nodded. "Never to see us again, that is what it will mean," he said. "Never. You will give us up, and we will go, never to return. You understand?" Again she nodded. "You are a kind of magician yourself," he said surprisingly then. "Me?" she cried. "A magician?" "There is more than one kind of magic," he said. "Flowers out of thin air, vanishing doves, snow in June--that is only part of it. Sam'el found that out, too. But is your magic stronger than his? He is an old man, and he clings tight--to everything, and to memories most of all." "You mean--" Carrie's mind was reeling--"you mean you--all of you--are Sam'el's memories?" "Does it seem impossible?" "No-o. No," she replied slowly. "Not impossible. Is anything? Impossible, I mean?" "That depends," he said. "One day you, too, will be old. Will you look back then, I wonder, and think that all this was impossible--that it didn't happen at all--that you dreamed it long ago, one far-off autumn by the sea when you were still a child, and believed in such things. Will you, I wonder?"

When I picked out this book--signed by Helen Cresswell when she visited my school in 1994--I showed my son the bookmark from when I was reading this back then. It was sitting at the start of chapter 4, so when we finished the book, I put the bookmark back there. I wonder when I'll next look at that bookmark, if ever.

Nice to see some conclusions.

I knew Jasna was going to make a comeback. Her "death" was so anticlimactic.

Glad to see the end of a certain high prince, too.