After the long dark night, the light returns. Ulysses is saved, and the rescue is triumphant — a tiny squirrel and a band of lonely misfits winning out against fear, despair, and a cold, scheming plan. Against every gloomy prediction Flora's cynicism ever made, things turn out, somehow, all right. More than the squirrel is rescued. Slowly and imperfectly, the broken pieces of Flora's family begin to mend. Her parents soften; her father grows braver; even her difficult mother is changed. And Flora herself has been transformed. The hardened cynic of the first page has become a girl whose guarded heart has finally begun to unfurl — a girl brave enough to hope, and to love, and to cry out 'Holy bagumba!' in pure wonder. Ulysses types one last poem, a tender gift of love for Flora, and it is this — not his super-strength — that is his true legacy. The ending is bittersweet, as the best endings are: the family is mended but not made perfect, and joy arrives hand in hand with the memory of pain. Yet the book closes in light. True to its title — 'The Illuminated Adventures' — the story leaves its lonely characters, and its readers, with their hearts a little more open and the world a little more full of wonder.