It's been a long time since I first read this book. And it was fun to read it again. The narrated versions of the books are very well done. In this book, which has Flinx on Alaspin returning Pips babies to the wild, Flinx finds himself wrapped up in an adventure related to a beautiful young woman he finds injured and in danger. She is at risk from a group of extremists. While Flinx spends time with her, he experiences his first romantic entanglement. Over time, and additional dangers and adventures, he has to decide what that means for him, especially when she has different life goals.I was surprised at how much Flinx revealed about himself in this book. And some of it does come back to bite him. At the same time, he is growing and changing. While we all wonder who we'll turn out to be, for Flinx those questions are much more complicated. Events in the book lead to him learning more about himself and what he can do. However, there is still much that is uncertain.At the end of the book, we learn about a new threat that is likely to take some time to fully understand and deal with. We also get to see some friends from a previous book, and it is foreshadowed that we'll see them again in the future. I'm looking forward to that time.
The first 3 or 4 books of this series were out when I was younger, and Flinx fired my imagination with his psionic talents, his flying, venom spitting snake, pip, and him being an orphan raised on the streets.This book advance Flinx's story a minuscule amount, just enough to get you to read it. There is also an interstellar evil introduced briefly, that Flinx is supposed to save the universe from (as of book 13 this still has not happened). This book marks a change in the series; at this point the publisher and author realized that Pip & Flinx are a cash cow and started milking it. So from here out you get very little advancement on Flinx's story.I wanted for Flinx to develop and use his psionic talents. The series is now something like 13 books and his mental talents are still unreliable and pretty much useless; this was a very, very, very big disappointment to me for the series as a whole.
