A richly imagined universe that holds terrifying secrets...

I first became interested in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy after seeing the film based on it. I found the screenplay to be disjointed and lacking, so I decided to read the original novel in order to have a better idea of important missing background information.

Lyra Belacqua is a wild child growing up among stodgy scholars at Oxford's Jordan College. She's content sneaking around slinging mud, engaging in street fights with rival schools, and avoiding any real sort of education. Her daemon Pantalaimon is her voice of reason. And here is Pullman's first masterpiece: daemons are human souls that are present as an accompanying animal; they are connected to their owner, yet have distinct personalities. Generally, a daemon is the opposite gender of its human. Only children have daemons that are able to shapeshift; once they reach puberty, their daemon will maintain that form.

Lyra and Pantalaimon witness an attempted murder that would have had devastating consequences for them both, and intervene. And so starts Lyra's journey to the North; to Svalbard, a reimagined Norway that's a dangerous land swarming with cliff-ghasts, ruthless Tatar tribes, and armored polar bears. Her secret weapon is an alethiometer, the titular "Golden Compass" that allows its user to ask a series of questions in order to discover the truth. There are very few in existence, and fewer still that know how to accurately read it. Lyra is one of those few.

Along the way, she becomes involved with the gyptians, a Gypsy-like seafaring tribe, a Texan balloon pilot, a friendly witch, and an exiled prince that aid her on her quest to reach her Uncle Asriel. Richly imagined and brimming with tantalizingly complex science, Pullman's universe is, much like Tolkien and Rowling's works, a self-contained universe that possesses its own form of religion (as many have noted, Pullman's works are anti-religion, or at least anti-organized religion), history, geography, and science. The book is much more richly nuanced and imagined than the film adaptation, which does a dreadful disservice to the original novel by omitting the final chapters.

A note: if you consider yourself to be very religious, you may not want your children reading these books, as there are numerous anti-religious (specifically, anti-Catholic) sentiments within, as well as discussions of castration and scenes of at times extreme violence, including towards children. Pullman, an atheist, takes issue with the dangers of organized religion; as one character puts it, "Every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling." However, the His Dark Materials trilogy is beautifully written and imagined and has much to recommend it.