Wednesday, April 11, 2007

The Golden Compass By: Philip Pullman

Also known as The Northern Lights, I originally read this book in 2002 and loved it, now that I have found out they are making of movie out of this book I went back to see if this book was as good as I remembered (i remembered it was good...not the plot) and it was just as great. Can't wait for the movie to come out!

Can you imagine living in a parallel world to ours where people have a part of themselves outside of them, but connected to them in the form of an animal? Well in Lyra's world, they do. They are called daemons and every person has one. Lyra is a young girl living in Oxford, growing up in Jordan College among the scholars. Her life involves playing with her friend Roger and the kids throughout the town, and every few months has to clean up nice for a visit from her uncle, Lord Asriel. But when children start disapearing around the country and eventually Roger does too, Lyra knows she has to do something. Using the special device that the Master of Jordan College gives her, she goes off to rescue Roger on what comes to be an adventure.

The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman's first novel in his trilogy His Dark Materials is fantastic. It doesn't matter at what age you read it, its just as great. Pullman manages to draw Lyra through and extraordinarally large amount of people throughout the story, and still make it easy to remember who all the characters are. The parallel world where this story takes place is a very believable place, yet really different. The book is well written, and very interesting. I'd recommend this book for anyone who likes some fantasy combined with a bit of the real world.

1 comments:

Em said...

Have you checked out the movie website? http://www.goldencompassmovie.com/
You can even find out what your own daemon would be. :-)
I really like your reviews! You can read mine at www.emsbookshelf.blogpsot.com.