The Subtle Knife

Rating:
Summary: A new author for me but one I'll continue reading
Review: Pullman did an excellent job with this series and particularly with the book the subtle knife. It was my favorite one. All I really have to say is that the characters were excellent. They were as real as they could get from the pages of a book. Wil was awesome. Hes just a mysterious youth with a troubling past and a knack for getting chased by the wrong crowd. He is also incredibly intelligent for his age. Later in the book he inherits the subtle knife...the ultimate weapon.
Will goes on to meet the main character of the Golden Compass, Lyra, and the two start their journeys together. They are quite an interesting pair.
Pullmans world is highly imaginative. It is filled with magic, intrigue, and well thought out plot and characters. AN EXCELLENT READ!!!

Rating:
Summary: Short but sweet, this book is as good as the original.
Review: The Golden Compass ended with Lyra entering another world, practically begging for a sequel. This book, however, opens in our world with the story of Will Parry.

He has a mentally disturbed mother, a father who dissapeared on an expedition to the north years ago, and his cst Moxy. Now his house has been burgled repeatedly by two strange individuals. When our story opens, Will has accidentaly killed one of them. He drops off his mother at his piano teacher's house, and, with a briefcase full of letters that his father sent, heads out of the house. And, lo and behold, he comes across a gatexay to another world: Citagazze, plagued by specters, evil creatures who feed on your daemon, visible or not. But they only attack you if you are beyond puberty, suspicously like Dust. It is in this world that Will meets Lyra, and they set off together. Lyra meets up with some old aquaintances, and Will gets the subtle knife, a weapon with immesurable power. One side of it can cut through any material on Earth, while the other side is sharper still, letting you cut a gateway between worlds.

Definitely a worthy sequel to The golden Compass, this book will have you reading it again, and again, and again. Slightly darker than the prequel, this book will leave you speechless.

Final grade "A+"

Adieu!

Rating:
Summary: a more than worthy sequel
Review: The Golden Compass pulled me in with its wild, spunky heroine, and the wonderful and creative concept of daemons, animal companions that are external manifestations of the soul. More than anything else, it made me want a daemon of my own.
The Subtle Knife brings the story to a whole new level. It introduces moral and philosophical questions that some might say are too heavy for young readers (although I think we ought to give kids more credit). It adds a science-fictiony flavour to the story, which, although far from hard-science, is an interesting twist. It also introduces a second hero, a boy named Will. Yes, he does take a great deal of the focus off Lyra, but let's be fair. She did, after all, have the first book all to herself, and the trilogy is clearly meant to be both of their stories. Besides, Will is every bit as likeable a hero as she is. Best (or worst, depending on whose review you're reading) of all, it pulls our own world into it. How many people, after reading the first book, wished they could cross the bridge into its world? Now Pullman is saying, yes, it's possible to do just that. In the context of the story, anyway.
The plot of this second book focuses more on revelation than actual story development, although the friendship between Lyra and Will is quite touching, and a few characters, some fairly important, die (one of the death scenes actually brought tears to my eyes). Primarily, though, we discover what makes the alethiometer work, what Lord Asriel *really* intends to do, and a lot more about the nature of the mysterious Dust.
And now, the inevitable comparison to Harry Potter. His Dark Materials is much darker, and requires more effort on the part of the reader. The target age group is a little older. Like any number of fantasies aimed at kids (Harry Potter, Narnia, Prydain), it speaks to adult readers just as powerfully. It lacks the commercial appeal of Harry and his wizarding friends, but on the whole, it's a much deeper and more involving tale. At the very least, it's an excellent read for all those who are gnashing their teeth and waiting impatiently for JK Rowling's next effort.

Rating:
Summary: Where there's Will, there's a way...
Review: This book was a worthy successor to The Golden Compass. The new character to share the spotlight with Lyra is Will Parry, resident of our own England and son of vanished explorer John Parry. The witches are back, as is the evil(?) Mrs. Coulter, who seems to be betraying everyone at the same time.

Lyra has been wandering foggy territory for days, and is at first unaware that she has reached another world. Will, by some happy coincidence, locates a "window" to the same world Lyra has unwittingly stepped into. The city is haunted by Specters, spirits who eat the soul of adults but leave children alone until they "ripen." The orphans of Cittagazze spurn them, but Will and Lyra can get on without their help.

Will's underlying quest is to find out what happened to his father, whom he barely knows. He discovers through a rather gruesome happening that he is to be the bearer of the Subtle Knife--a dagger that can cut windows between the millions of worlds, and the two travel between our Earth and Lyra's. Thus as long as Will is around, there is a quick escape from any danger that might threaten. And threaten it does!

Lee Scoresby also takes a prominent role, searching for lost researcher Stanislaus Grumman (who, you will remember, was assumed dead in the last book) and being forced to make one desperate decision that has horribly drastic consequences. A female doctor of physics in our world learns from Lyra how to read Dust herself. She is told that she is to play the serpent...and as in Genesis, everything hinges upon the serpent.

The serpent, and Lyra.

Rating:
Summary: More gripping.
Review: This is the second book of His Dark Materials (after Northern Lights, or The Golden Compass in the US, and before The Amber Spyglass).

Will Parry is a twelve-year-old boy living in Oxford with his mother, who's suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and his cat Moxie. His father, an arctic explorer, has gone missing almost since the boy was born.

Will's mother has been facing more and more crises of late, and strangers have been harrassing her repeatedly, asking questions about her husband, about the letters he sent her twelve years ago. Will decides to send her to his old piano teacher's house to keep her safe, but when these men come back and search their home, Will accidently kills one of them. Not wanting to call the police because they would put his mother into hospital, he takes his father's letters from their hiding place in the sewing machine, and flees.

But walking on the side of the road, he sees a cat much like Moxie suddenly disappear. Examining the patch of grass more closely, he discovers a window, resolves to cross it, and finds himself in Cittàgazze, a sun-drenched, palm-treed city on the sea shore, in another world.

The city looks as if everyone just left in a hurry though, and when Will is looking for food in the recently abandoned cafés, he stumbles onto a lost young girl, Lyra. Although shocked to see a human without a daemon, and after asking her alethiometer for advice, she knows she can trust Will, and they finally decide to help each other.

The rest of the book describes how they travel back and forth between worlds, Will searching for his father, Lyra gathering information about Dust, both making new allies as well as meeting new enemies, facing new, more deadly dangers.

I liked The Subtle Knife more than Northern Lights (US title: The Golden Compass), was more gripped by it as a whole. I particularly enjoyed the connections between Lyra's and Will's (our) Oxford, when Lyra discovers what is similar, and what is not, to the place where she grew up. There's still a rather mystic edge to the story which I don't quite get, but I guess everything will clear up in the last chapter.