Reviewer: Elayne

April 13, 2006 x

His Dark Materials was an amazing series. I didn't know what to expect, going in, but it was relatively easy to get into for the first bit and then the rest of the story drew me in. I'm one of those readers who doesn't do a whole lot of prediction while I read -- I consume what's in front of me at the time, confident that I'll get what I came for, so it came as quite a bit of a surprise to me what the main thrust of the story was. I won't go into that, but Lyra and Will were amazing characters and the idea of Daemons, which actually put me off the series a little bit, became familiar, and at the end, when some new daemons appeared, I was actually happy to meet them, so to speak (type). I didn't expect to be as affected, emotionally, by the ending, as I was. Granted, I'm a long way from home and I miss my family already, but Pullman did a great job of creating believable, sympathetic and likeable characters that the bittersweet ending seemed more bitter and less sweet. I can see how this series could have been written for children but I didn't feel talked-down-to. It was a good book on many levels, and probably at many levels. I liked that it felt real, how aside from the fantastorical elements, you felt like the characters would have acted exactly the way they did. This is one of those series that will probably disappear from my head in two or three years, and then eight to ten years down the road, I'll find them in some "Already-been-read" box and I'll have to pick them up and read them again. It was the same with Eddings's books (nostalgia more than quality of story, I guess), C.S. Lewis's Narnia series, and Terry Goodkind's first three Sword of Truth novels. There are other series that I would put in there, if I didn't read them obsessively, every year. (I'm looking at you, Robert Jordan) So yeah, um... read His Dark Materials. It's worth it.