The middle third is a bit of a slog although my friend did point out that this book came out the year after the first Harry Potter book and that explain an awful lot of the choices made there. Shame Millennia never got to do... well, anything, really. She felt like an inanimate object long before she got turned into a puppet.

I think the Toymaker sections of this were fun although at times I did get the sense I could have just been reading Alice in Wonderland instead and not miss out on much. Possibly the best part was Tegan's characterisation - the joy of these books is that you can give characters internal monologues in a way the TV show never allowed for, and it felt like Gary Russell wrote her with a sense of compassion that few of the TV writers afforded her