HIS DARK MATERIALS IS NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SERIES STARRING DAFNE KEEN, RUTH WILSON, JAMES McAVOY, AND LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA!
The spellbinding sequel to The Golden Compass, the modern fantasy classic that Entertainment Weekly named an "All-Time Greatest Novel" and Newsweek hailed as a "Top 100 Book of All Time," continues the epic adventure, catapulting readers between worlds, and toward a devastating discovery.
Lost in a new world, Lyra finds Will—a boy on the run, a murderer—a worthy and welcome ally. For this is a world where soul-eating Specters stalk the streets and witches share the skies with troops of angels.
Each is searching—Lyra for the meaning of Dark Matter, Will for his missing father—but what they find instead is a deadly secret, a knife of untold power. And neither Lyra nor Will suspects how tightly their lives, their loves, their destinies are bound together...until they are split apart. A #1 New York Times Bestseller
Published in 40 Countries
“Just as quick-moving and unputdownable as The Golden Compass. . . . The mysteries deepen and the wonders grow even more extravagant.” —The Washington Post
“Pullman’s imagination soars . . . A literary rollercoaster ride you won’t want to miss.”—The Boston Globe
“The story gallops with ferocious momentum . . . Devilishly inventive.” —The New York Times Book Review
Don't miss Philip Pullman's epic new trilogy set in the world of His Dark Materials! ** THE BOOK OF DUST ** La Belle Sauvage The Secret Commonwealth
As a TV-series based on these books seems to be coming out soon, I figured it would be a good time to pick up my rereading of His Dark Materials. I'm sure I've read these books before, but they are filed under the category of books I read so long ago that I can't remember anything at all about them.
The Subtle Knife left me feeling unsatisfied. The story is told very well, and the atmosphere created by the storytelling is wonderful, but the story itself didn't do it for me. It's meant to be disjointed - the narrative skips around from place to place - but it skipped around just often enough that I never managed to immerse myself as much in the book as the storytelling called for. The lack of immersion might be my fault. I read the book in quite a lot of sittings, and this is a book that might not lend itself very well to that.
For a book this short, The Subtle Knife felt surprisingly long. There were sections which, while the existence of them did add to the story, felt much longer than they needed to be. There is a sense of many threads being laid out which will eventually come together to make up the final story, but as a standalone books there were a few too many threads in this one, and not enough attention paid to each of them.
I'm sure my problems with this book will all be justified by the last book in the series. At least I truly hope so.
