29 Nov 2010 No Comments
"The Golden Compass" by Phillip Pullman
Read the book. Don’t see the movie.
“The Golden Compass” by Phillip Pullman (grade 7 and up) is the first in the “His Dark Materials” trilogy. It’s easily the best of the three books and can confidently stand alone. In a landmark epic of fantasy and storytelling, Pullman invites readers into a world as convincing and thoroughly realized as Narnia, Earthsea, or Redwall.
Here lives an orphaned ward named Lyra Belacqua, whose carefree life among the scholars at Oxford’s Jordan College is shattered by the arrival of two powerful visitors. First, her fearsome uncle, Lord Asriel, appears with evidence of mystery and danger in the far North, including photographs of a mysterious celestial phenomenon called Dust and the dim outline of a city suspended in the Aurora Borealis that he suspects is part of an alternate universe.
He leaves Lyra in the care of Mrs. Coulter, an enigmatic scholar and explorer who offers to give Lyra the attention her uncle has long refused her.
In this multilayered narrative, however, nothing is as it seems. Lyra sets out for the top of the world in search of her kidnapped playmate, Roger, bearing a rare truth-telling instrument, the compass of the title. All around her children are disappearing, victims of so-called “Gobblers” being used as subjects in terrible experiments that separate humans from their animal daemons, creatures that reflect each person’s inner being. And somehow, both Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter are involved in this horrible experiment.
If you have a teen who likes to read and hasn’t read this series, buy it for them for the holidays. But be warned, once they start reading you may not see them again for the rest of winter break.
As an aside, I must also confess that while glued to this book, I fell head over heels in love with a polar bear. Read it yourself, and you’ll know why.
