Rating: 
Summary: Oh... my... God...
Review: A friend of mine recommended me this book, saying it was the best book ever written. I was skeptic, since he's kinda crazy, and gets all worked up whenever he reads something half-decent quality-wise. But I bought this book anyway. And I loved it. The characters are great (although some of them are really obscure and weird) the story is amazingly original. I gotta hand it to Pullman, I would've never come up with such an original story.The setting kinda reminds me of a early 1900's steampunkish world, but it's so different from ours, it would be hard to classify it correctly. Undoubtably one of the best books I've ever read, if not THE best. I can't wait to get my hands on the sequel...
Rating:
Summary: Incredibly involving
Review: This is really a review of the entire trilogy rather than this specific book - it's excellent. Pullman conjours up rich, interesting and believable (within the confines of the fantasy world). What I mean is that the worlds work, and you can believe they might exist. As a Christian, I found some of the material a little uncomfortable, but as the ideas are interesting and ( if you read on) he isnt actually anti - God (kind of). but the story is gripping, the descriptions excellent, the ideas and philosophy interesting and the charachters believable. What more do you want?
Rating: 
Summary: Northern Lights (The Golden Compass)
Review: I've read this book twice--no, not because I was blown away by it the first time that I had to read it again, but because the first time I read it I lost interest close to the end. Don't get me wrong, Pullman is a talented writer. The sentences are filled with wonderful vocabulary, and it is easy to tell that the book was well thought out, well imagened. I liked many of the ideas, although there are some parts where the writing gets a little bit flat and although there is action, they become uninteresting. Lyra is caught up in something beyond her control, and when her friend is captured, she goes to the North with the gyptians in search of him. She is a spunky girl with a contagious, youthful personality. I thought that the book was interesting, although there are some cliche plot twists, and that anyone who likes fantasy would like this book. 4 stars for a great book!
Rating:
Summary: EVERYONE MUST READ THS BOOK!!!!!
Review: I LOVE!!!!!!! these books. There's no good way to really describe them. They're amazing. Everything is so well thought out, and they're just so good. Reading them is so great. There's only one bad thing about this trilogy. There's only three of them. I wish there were more, so I re-read them all the time. And they only get better. They're some of the only books that have evr made me cry. The charactors are so real. They're not predictable, and everything that happense to them leaves an impact on you. I was so excited when the third one finnally came out, but it was definatly worth the wait. I would give this trilogy a billion stars if I could. There is nothing that could be improved. They're absoulutly perfect.
P.S. I want to see my daemon.
Rating:
Summary: Wonder Story of andventure and fantasy
Review: To the person reading this review; let me ask you a question. Do you enjoy a good story, a story filled with high adventure, amazing characters, intricate plots and subplots, a premise that will knock you socks off, a story that makes you think as well as going far beyond in terms of keeping you turning page after page in anticipation of what is going to happen next? This book is for you. A beautifully laid out story laced with emotion. I can't wait to read the other books in the series. This one, by the way, is the first.
Rating:
Summary: AMAZING!!
Review: I LOVE THIS BOOK!!!! It's so well thought out and reaserched, but you don't read it that way. Everything is so perfect, it amazes me every time I read it. I would reccomend this book to anyone of any age. It's wonderful.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Story Ruined by Misogynist Mindset
Review: OK, you say, what kind of Misogynist has a female for a main character? A clever one. This is a very engaging story that I would have said was on par with Tolkein or C.S. Lewis except that I had to cringe about every other chapter when Mr. Pullman would make a degrading remark about women. Before you think that I am yet another oversensitive, politically correct, feminazi; let me say that I have never written a book review or editorial before in my life. I also believe in supporting men's rights equally with women's, we can't have it both ways. This book, however, seemed to me to be so blatantly negative, covered up by the clever ruse of making the main character female, that I felt I had to express my distaste in a public forum. Some of these negative messages include the author's statments and depictions that only men could be proper scholars and that women who tried to be scholars were either social misfits or evil schemers. Another was that the Gyption women could not be brought on perilous journeys even though children could. The only positive female characters in this book in fact are a mother figure(read: proper place for women), a witch (read beautiful, forever young and the lover of one of the male characters) and the main character. And let's look at what kind of girl this character is. First, she is not a woman; she is clearly pre-pubescent. She is a tomboy who associates exclusively with other boys and men, and she is raised exclusively by men (read: without the taint of woman) The only exception to this is her early life, which she cannot remember, spent with a wet nurse and at a convent (read: during the diaper and toilet training stages). In other words, when you take into account all of the other female characters in the book, a boy in girl's clothing. With all of the negative statements and depictions of women in this book, I think the writer figured he would have to make his main character a female in order to not have every woman castigating him from sea to shining sea. One has to wonder if Mr. Pullman was going through a bad divorce when he wrote this book. All in all, this is not a book I would let my daughters or nieces read.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Read!!
Review: I LOVED this book. It was full of everything,adventure,danger,friendship,and sorrow. The people and creatures in it are great and the end of the book is the beginning of the next (The Subtle Knife). It is one of my favorite book series.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful and captivating, with an unsatisfactory ending
Review: I don't like fantasies. They usually have a smug, Robin-Williams-esque undertone which keeps saying "the real world sucks, but if somebody had given me the opportunity to show everyone how to do it RIGHT, then here's how it would be". So this book must have been great, because I loved it! The heroine is Lyra, a young girl of indeterminate age (she's apparently about 13 or 14). The centerpiece of Pullman's vision is the "daemon" - an intimate companion in animal form with which every human in Pullman's world comes equipped. Each person's daemon is bound to him or her with a love and intimacy stronger than anything experienced between two people, and if the human dies then so does the daemon. The existence of daemons is bound up with both theological and scientific mysteries, and the attempts to unravel those mysteries has created a titanic struggle among the people who are interested in solving them. Pullman never explains the full solution to the mysteries (an omission which is obviously deliberate), but there are those who are willing to inflict great damage and cruelty on their fellow beings while trying to discover all the secrets of the universe for their own benefit. Two of these people are Lyra's own father and mother, although she doesn't know them to be her parents until well into the story. Lyra has a special destiny to save the world from the ravages of this desperate race to unlock the secrets. While following her quest, she comes in contact with gypsies, armored bears, and semi-immortal witches, some of them good and some bad. Pullman has a sparkling imagination and is a solid writer, so the book kept me happily and gently within its grasp for as long as I was reading it. However, the ending was disappointing. It is almost as if Pullman came to page 396, realized he had to end it by page 400, and thought, "Well let's see I've got to end this thing and leave the reader hanging so he'll want to read the other two volumes in the planned trilogy...." and so he wraps things up with an ending which contradicts almost the entire story up to that point. No explanation is given for the sudden change in viewpoint, other than a quick and muddled conversation between Lyra and her daemon. The two of them then resolve to follow a path almost completely unrelated to what they have been doing for the previous 400 pages. In addition, Pullman informs us at that point that they (Lyra and her daemon) will follow this new quest without any of the characters we have grown to know and love during this first book. Nor does he tell us what happens to all of those friends who helped Lyra on her way. Of course, I haven't read any of the second book in the trilogy (The Subtle Knife), and I don't know whether the third volume has even been published yet. But it seems that the second volume of the "trilogy" is likely to have very little to do with the first. As lousy as the ending is (and I really think it stinks), I can't deduct more than one star for that. The other 396 pages are just too entertaining and imaginative to be that negative about the entire book.
Rating:
Summary: Please stop calling them children's books!
Review: I hate that this series falls under that title of "kid's books". I adore this series, but the only other people I've talked to that have read them are between the ages of 11 and 13. The kids think I'm crazy for reading "kid's books" and the parents of these kids think I'm even crazier. I agree that some age and experience enhances this series. So all of you out there with age and experience, start reading! PS I want to see my daemon!!
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