Golden Compass

It started with a wardrobe. Sound family? It should. Was it not a wardrobe that Lucy stepped into before finding herself in the land of Narnia? But instead we don't find a fantasy land, only old scholar robes, the sight of a poisoning, all by a girl named not Lucy, but Lyra. This is the beginning of a long fantasy tale with a not-so-normal fantasy feel.

Ok, I'll admit it, I really didn't like this book from the start. I love old school fantasy , kings, queens, dragons, elves, unicorns, you name it, I love to read it. Not something a lot of people like to admit to, but regardless, that's the stuff I enjoy reading. There were parts of the book that I did find refreshing, like the part with the Nun who decided she would rather enjoy sex then continue to lead a life of chastity for God, then goes on to enlighten Lyra about felling good about sex, and that "Sex is ok". Not something a lot of parents would agree with when letting 12 year olds read this. But I found it refreshing after growing up in a christen house hold, after going to church for so long and being told over and over that I'll burn in hell if I even think about letting a boy touch me before he puts a ring on my finger, so yes, this was refreshing. There was a good bit of anti-christen (more like anti-catholic) themes in this book, in fact, well, the church WAS the bad guy. This made things very interesting, so I kept reading. But the style of writing, felt, cold to me. After reading the Narnia series this was like being told everything I thought I knew about fantasy writing was dead wrong.

Aside from not really liking the writing style, I did kinda enjoy the story. It was well told and I did end up wanting to read the next of the series almost just to see what all the fuss was about. I also thought the idea of having the soul as a visible thing that one could touch and talk to was, well, really cool! The author did an awesome job with the demons, er, I mean, "deamons". With them he was able to enlighten the audience of the inner feelings, and true nature of a character, without having to actually explain what the character was thinking internally.

Another rather interesting thing that I did find in "typical fantasy" was the weak but powerful characters. The characters you would figure as powerful were weak in it's presence, or, the power was ulatmatly thier downfall, where as characters we would figure as weak, were very powerful, like Lyra. I thought this was interesting for such a backwards fantasy as the Golden Compass, that Phillip Pullman would take the Tolken route, Bilbo was no knight when we met him after all, nor was Frodo.