His Dark Materials, Book I: The Golden Compass

Original story, fascinating world, endearing character DaveL The Golden Compass, like any book that has entered the popular consciousness through a movie, tends to be overhyped and perhaps oversimplified. But this first book of the trilogy tells a much more complex story.On the one hand, it's an introduction to an endearing twelve-year-old urchin, Lyra Belacqua, whose been raised by Oxford scholars in a familiar but parallel world. Her patron, Lord Asriel, flits in and out of her life, when not searching for the mysterious "dust,. Kilian85710 said Lyra rules. I liked this book even more the second time around. Being able to take thing slow because I know what is going to happen makes it possible to catch the nuance that I missed the first time around. I loved the witches and wished there were more about them.Pullman seems to love his characters and lovingly describes them and what happens to them. That is why I find it puzzling to read of the actions of Lord Azriel and Mrs Coulter. No explanation is given for their differing. Danielle said What a great start!!. Ahhhhhhh!!!!! I had skimmed this when I was a kid looking for something to fill the emptiness that was finishing the latest Harry Potter and I didn't like it. All these years later I listened to it and it is the bomb!!!!!! Love it!!!!!!! The movie didn't do it justice! Highly recommend!!!! In Audio too!

Such is certainly the case with Philip Pullman's heroic, at times heart-wrenching novel, The Golden Compass, a story ostensibly for children but one perhaps even better appreciated by adults. For one thing, people there each have a personal daemon, the manifestation of their soul in animal form. For another, hers is a universe in which science, theology, and magic are closely allied: As for what experimental theology was, Lyra had no more idea than the urchins. Probably the stars had daemons just as humans did, and experimental theology involved talking to them. There is also love, loyalty, and an abiding morality that infuses the story but never overwhelms it. This is one of those rare novels that one wishes would never end. Some books improve with age--the age of the reader, that i

In this multilayered narrative, however, nothing is as it seems. 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. Coulter, an enigmatic scholar and explorer who offers to give Lyra the attention her uncle has long refused her. 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.