In anticipation of the forthcoming movie version, I finished reading The Golden Compass over Thanksgiving. What a fun fantasy novel this is! It is set in a parallel universe, very similar to ours but definitely NOT ours. Lyra is our main character; she's a young girl living in a boarding-type situation in Oxford, England who has a tendency to listen in where she probably shouldn't. She ends up going on a quest to save a friend from a serious torture situation and in the end, she winds up in a position to change the fate of this universe. I will warn you that this book, while it does come to a sort of conclusion, cliff-hangs into the next book. I have been tearing the library apart looking for the second book, The Subtle Knife; the system says it's checked in, but it is Missing in Action. As you can imagine, it's driving me nuts, and I have a replacement copy on order. :) I'm picking up a copy from the public library that I put a hold on over break!
Some of you may be familiar with the controversy brewing over the movie (and therefore the book). The author, Phillip Pullman, is a well-known atheist, and so there is a great deal of protesting going on about this story. All I can say is that it must get more sensitive in the following books, because I picked up on very little in Compass that seemed offensive. That's not to say it's not there-- I might have missed it-- but very little threw up red flags to me. If you would like to find out more about Pullman and the controversy, start with the Wikipedia article on the books which the title of this post is hyperlinked to. From there, you can do more research if you're interested.
Has anyone else read this? Would you like to chat about it?
:)
Mrs. P
