Book completed

The Death of Chaos, by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. Recluce #5. In the first Recluce book, we met Lerris, a disaffected teenager exiled from the island of Recluce, who becomes a journeyman woodworker and part-time powerful wizard on the side of order versus chaos. The next three books went back in time to tell how things got to be this way, also giving us the backstory for Lerris's uncle Justen, a gray wizard under whom Lerris briefly apprenticed. Now Lerris and the other order-wizards must resolve the crisis that's been building all this time, binding up all that free chaos within order (as happens naturally in living things, which is why these are techniques taught by the small community of druids into which Justen has married). Lerris is by this time an entirely likeable narrator, no longer held back by the attitude problems that came up regularly in the first book, and it's fun to follow his story, although the ending is sad, as the previous generation of wizards and other family members knows it cannot survive the necessary magical changes.