Not a huge fan of the sudden change to Matt's character - he hardly shows up in the previous books, then all of a sudden he's given powers by Kandrakar and turns into the stereotypical mysterious brooding guide. Also not sure what happened to Kandrakar's triumvirate system; at the first sign of danger the Oracle freaks out and makes a rash decision without consulting Yan Lin or Endarno (who's also nowhere to be found), as if he never learned his lesson from the Trial of the Oracle arc. The girls' quests to find the "roots" to their new powers felt a little arbitrary and cliched (why did they have to lose their original powers to begin with?) and we could have gotten a little more backstory on Dark Mother instead of the mere mention that she was power-hungry.

Having read all the previous installments back-to-back, it was also hard not to notice a glaring inconsistency - if the girls were given their powers by Kandrakar in their teens, at the start of this series, how did the roots to their powers begin in their infant/child years? Any powers would have been with the Guardians that preceded them.

Overall, the New Power arc feels more rushed and lazily-written than usual, and the art is a far cry from the vibrancy of the very first books in the series, but it still keeps my interest enough to see how it ends. ( )