The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

Rating: WORTHY!

Will Parry is being sought by bad men, is taking care of his mother, and is obsessed over the disappearance of his father. He thinks that if only he can find his lost explorer father, then all his problems will be solved. He's wrong.

He deposits his mom with a family friend where he feels she will be safe while he goes to Oxford to try and find clues on his father's whereabouts, but the bad guys find him, and suddenly, having accidentally killed one of them, he's on the run, and he stumbles upon a window into a parallel world. In this world he runs into Lyra Silver-tongue, aka Lyra Belaqua, aka Lizzie, who has arrived in this world by following her father over the bridge he created by killing her best friend.

Serafina Pekkala, Lyra's witch friend who is always (very nearly always anyway) known and referred to by her full name for reasons unexplained is searching for her and eventually finds her in Cittàgazze, the city where 'spirits' suck the soul from children as soon as they become adults - however that's defined. When one of the local children is killed in such a way, the other children blame Lyra and Will, and it's only through the intervention of the witches that the two of them escape.

By this time, Will has come into possession of The Subtle Knife. This is a dagger-like implement which can cut through pretty much anything, including the thin veneer between worlds. Will was evidently destined to become the knife bearer, according to the old man, the previous knife-bearer who, now that Will has taken charge of the knife, quickly dies.

Before she is forced to flee C'gazze, Lyra has been with Will to our Oxford, and has met Mary Malone, a physicist who has been investigating dark matter, which turns out to be the very Dust of Lyra's world, and it also turns out to have a certain amount of intelligence.

During their sojourn in Oxford/Cittàgazze, Lyra and will were also forced to recover her alethiometer from Sir Charles Latrom, a man she encounters in Oxford, who knew of her device and stole it from her. He's really Lord Boreal, and in cahoots with Mrs Coulter, until, having extracted the secret of the knife from him, she murders him and sets off in search of this knife. If Lyra is destined to be the second Eve, then Mrs Coulter vows she will also kill her own daughter rather than risk a second fall.

Will finally encounters his father, known as Jopari or Grumman, and disappointing and unsatisfactory it is, too, but he does finally stanch the bleeding finger stubs where Will lost fingers when the took ownership of the knife.

This volume ends with Will returning to Lyra only to discover that she's been kidnapped. Her guardian witches have been killed by spirits, and her alethiometer is all that remains of her. That and two angels, Balthamos and Baruch who are insistent upon Will going with them to join Lord Asriel.

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

Rating: WORTHY!

In my continuing effort to catch up with reviews of older novels I've read but never got around to reviewing, here goes! This is book one of the 'His Dark Materials' trilogy, and it's one which I've read at least thrice, twice for myself and once for my kids as bedtime stories. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's brilliant!

I have to add, too, that the audio book which I review here is a treat. I think it's without doubt the best audio presentation to which I've ever listened. The whole thing is performed like a radio play, with a cast of some two dozen, including the author, Philip Pullman himself, narrating. All of them, including Pullman, do an exquisite job. Here's the cast list:

Sean Barrett............Lord Asriel/Iorek Byrnison
Andrew Branch...........Kaisa/Able Seaman Jerry
Douglas Blackwell.......John Faa/Iofur Raknison
Harriet Butler..........Bella
Anna Coghlan............Bridget McGinn
Rupert Degas............Pantalaimon
Alison Dowling..........Mrs. Coulter
David Graham............Jotham Santelia
Stephen Greif...........Martin Lanselius/Sysselman
Garrick Hagon...........Lee Scoresby
Andrew Lamont...........1st Gyptian Boy
Fiona Lamont............Martha
Alexander Mitchell......Hugh Lovat
Arthur Mitchell.........Charlie
Hayward Morse...........The Butler/The Chaplain
John O'Connor...........The Dean
Philip Pullman..........Narrator
Anne Rosenfeld..........Mrs. Lonsdale
Liza Ross...............Stelmaria/Billy
Suzan Sheridan..........Serafina Pekkala/Roger
Jill Shilling...........Ma Costa
Stephen Thorne..........The Master/Farder Coram
Rachel Wolf.............Annie
Joanna Wyatt............Lyra
Other parts were played by members of the cast

Because it's a book, this original novel can go into far more detail than the movie ever did, and every bit of the extra detail is well-worth the reading. It gives a much richer experience, and offers several important differences.

Lyra Belacqua is a girl on the cusp of her teens in an alternate reality where the world is very similar to ours in many regards, but very, very different in others. The most immediately evident of these is in the fact that each of the humans in Lyra's world has a dæmon - an animal companion which represents their soul, and which is inseparable from their human. Lyra's dæmon is named Pantalaimon, but she exclusively refers to him as 'Pan'. The daemon is nearly always of the opposite gender to their human and Pan is amazing, funny, and engaging.

Lyra's parents, we're told, are dead, and she was placed at Jordan college at the University of Oxford, by her uncle, Lord Asrael. She loves the college and is fiercely loyal to it, but is hardly the best student in the world, despite the fact that she is quite obviously precocious and quite smart. Instead she runs wild around the college grounds and in the city, "warring" with her Jordan friends against other colleges, and with other colleges against the townies, and with the townies against the Gyptian travelers who periodically come through the city on their barges.

Lyra loves to explore the college, and when the novel begins, she's in trouble in that she's in a part of the college where women are not allowed, much less children, but she cannot escape, and is reduced to hiding in a wardrobe. From there, she can spy on events through a crack in the door. She watches a meeting between some of the college faculty and Lord Asrael, where she learns about Dust - with a capital D. This isn't your pain to clean and polish kind of dust, but some species of elementary particle which Lord Asrael believes is entering their universe from a parallel world in a separate universe. He asks for and receives funds to go to the north to further investigate this. Why he must go north, I do not know - I guess it's because that's the only place where there's been evidence of this leak between worlds.

This is where we get a significant change from the novel. In the novel, it's the master of Jordan college who tries to poison Asrael by putting something in his favorite drink (Tokay, pronounced Toe-ky - rhymes with sky), whereas in the movie, it's the recognized bad guys, the magisterium - in effect the church authorities, who try to poison him. Lyra is the one who saves his life.

One of Lyra's fears, and the source of some of her games, is 'Gobblers'. These are mysterious shadowy people who are said to abduct children, and she learns that they've arrived in Oxford. In short order, one of her friends among the Gyptians, Billy Costa, and her close friend at Jordan, a servant boy named Roger Parslow both go missing and no one seems to care.

Lyra is indignant, but before she can get too far with her rage, she's rather distracted by the arrival of a woman who rapidly becomes her hero, Mrs Coulter. The latter is exotic, and traveled, and mysterious, and is a "friend" of Jordan college. Lyra is offered the opportunity to go and live with her and become an 'assistant' to her, so she can continue her education, but also learn the ways of women, with which the stodgy and almost exclusively male population of Jordan college cannot help her. Lyra leaps at the opportunity, but soon comes to regret it.

Before she leaves, the Master entrusts Lyra with 'the golden compass' a truth-divining device powered by Dust. It's golden in color, with cryptic symbols around the circumference, and four hands on its dial, three of which Lyra can set to point to the symbols, posing a cryptic question. The fourth then starts rotating and twitching between other symbols, thereby delivering an answer. No one seems to know how to operate this 'alethiometer' but Lyra, to her credit, slowly figures it out. The master tells her that it was a gift to the college from Asrael, and Lyra imagines that the Master wants her to return it to her uncle. He warns her sternly not to ever reveal its existence to Mrs Coulter.

Her time with Coulter is longer in the novel than in the movie, but the termination of it is very similar. She realizes, eventually, that the Gobblers is nothing more than a corruption of the acronym GOB (General Oblation Board) and she and Pan, having suffered somewhat at the hands of Coulter's evil golden monkey (Coulter's dæmon) sneak out one night when Coulter is holding a party. It's quite as precipitous and dramatic as the movie makes it look! They wander the strange streets of London, and end up down by the docks where they encounter some hostile locals, from whom they're rescued by the Gyptians, and they become guests on Ma Costa's barge as the Gyptians travel to East Anglia - the very place I spent several vacations when I was a child! Yes, I'm sure that's the reason they went there.

Lyra learns that she is much sought after by the police, so she lays low on the barge until they reach their destination, where she meets the king of the Gyptians, Lord Faa, and his side-kick, Farder Coram. She shows them the alethiometer. It turns out that the Gyptians are big friends of Asrael's because of his kindness to, and support of them, and they have been keeping an eye on Lyra on his behalf. Lyra also learns, much to her surprise and dismay, Lord Asrael and Mrs Coulter are her actual parents. The Gyptian council figures out, with Lyra's assistance, that the children who are being abducted are being taken to a place in the far frozen north called Bolvangar.

On the sailing boat northwards, and unlike in the movie, Lyra does not meet Serafina Pekkala, the witch lover of the younger Farder Coram, but instead meets her dæmon, which is a goose. Lyra is very impressed that the two can be so far apart. She also encounters two 'spyflies' - mechanical creatures which contain a sting with a sleeping potion in it. She and Farder Coram capture one and keep it in a tin for later destruction.

The novel tells a slightly different story to the movie when it comes to Lyra's recruitment of Iorek Byrnison and her meeting with Lee Scoresby. The movie does a better job. Soon the whole crew is heading out onto the ice and traveling the frozen forest.

At one point, Lyra discovers something truly weird in one of her alethiometer readings which precipitates a trip with the bear one night to a village some hours away, where a 'ghost' is supposed to be tormenting the villagers. It turns out that the ghost is actually Tony Makarios (not Billy Costa as the movie has it). He has undergone the 'intercision' process, meaning that he has been severed from his dæmon. The dæmon, "Ratter" is nowhere to be seen, and Tony has a piece of dried fish as a substitute.

He's pathetic and several stops past sad. Despite her fear and her repugnance over his 'condition", Lyra rescues him and returns him to the Gyptian party where he later dies. recalling an experience from her exploratory days at Jordan, and furious that the Gyptians had fed his dried fish "dæmon" to their dogs, Lyra takes one of her gold coins and carves Ratter's name onto it placing it in Tony's mouth before he is cremated.

Lyra smartly asks Iorek to employ his metal-crafting skills create for her a small tin, about the size of her alethiometer, so that she now has two - a real one, and fake one which contains the spyfly which they caught on the ship. Shortly after this, the party is attacked by Samoyeds, and Lyra is captured and delivered to Bolvangar, where she is sold. This part of the story is much more complex than the movie, which completely excludes the entire part covering the storage of severed dæmons, and Lyra's freeing of them with the aid of Serafina Pekkala's goose dæmon.

Knowing that aid is on its way, Lyra evolves an escape plan for the children, but she is caught spying on a meeting (hiding in the false ceiling, not under the table as in the movie), and the staff decides it's high time for her turn at the intercision process. She's rescued at the last minute (not quite as last minute as the movie depicts!) by Mrs Coulter of all people, who takes her back to her own room and comforts her, but Lyra is in no way fooled now by this woman. When Coulter asks for the alethiometer, Lyra lets her take the fake one, and Coulter is knocked-out by a sting from the spyfly. Lyra pulls the fire alarm, and the children flee into the frozen night.

After a melee, these children are finally linked-up with the Gyptians, and Lyra takes off with Lee Scoresby to continue her quest to find her father and deliver to him the alethiometer. Roger goes along with her, and Scoresby's balloon is towed by witches, which is where Lyra first meets Serafina Pekkala in person.

After more incidents, Lyra finally reaches Asrael, who is not interested in her compass, but in her companion. Lyra wakes up the next morning to discover that Asrael has left and taken Roger with him. She realizes that he intends to sever Roger from his dæmon in order to generate sufficient power to make a passageway to the other world which can be seen in the Northern Lights. Contrary to the movie, this is where Lyra crosses the crumbling snow bridge, but she arrives too late to save Roger.

Lyra has a breakdown at Roger's fate and her impotence to stop it, from which she is distracted by her observations of her father and mother reconciling. Asrael tries to talk her into crossing the bridge with him, promising to love her unconditionally if she does, but vowing to forget her completely if she does not. Coulter is sorely tempted, but in the end, she leaves, bound for England, whereas Asrael goes across the bridge he created and into the parallel world which is now opened up. Left alone, Lyra and Pan discuss their options. They decide to pursue Asrael and to try to find the source of the dust before he does so they can thwart any plans he has for it.

This is a brilliant novel, well-deserving of the accolades heaped upon it. I liked the move very much, but this is much more fulfilling and rewarding as are the other two novels in this Dark Materials trilogy. I fully commend then all.

The Dragon Lady by Angelique S Anderson

Rating: WARTY!

This is supposedly a steampunk story, but quite literally the only steampunk element in it was goggles, and there was no reason whatsoever for main character Wylie to even wear them, let alone own them, since she did nothing with her life but muck-out stables for Lord Adrian.

He has zero appreciation for her as a person at all, despite purportedly being in love with her, and he supposedly harbors this love despite his knowing nothing about her or even spending any significant time with her - and despite being engaged to be married very soon to Lady Judith, Wylie's purported best friend. This tells me he's a spineless little weasel. Root for him and Wylie I cannot.

This for me was the biggest problem with this story. Even the ordinary affairs of life - like friendship and love, were of the most flimsy and shallow variety - the worst I've read in a long time. These are typical hallmarks of most YA stories, but they seemed a lot worse than usual in this case.

Another problem for me was that I suspected the author was not British because she used Americanisms where British cuss words or phrases ought to have appeared, and so I read a little about her and discovered I was right. At one point she writes, "Dad blammit it all, Wylie" which is not an English phrase. It's actually not even correct - there's an 'M' too many. Another one was "I'll be gol' darned" which again isn't an English phrase. Perhaps US readers will not notice this or not care, but it stands out like a sore thumb to English readers and spoils the authenticity.

On that score, the main two relationships were inauthentic too. Lady Judith is supposedly Wylie's best friend, but there's nothing shown to support this or to indicate how it even happened, and the two don't behave like best friends. Lady Judith is spoiled rotten and Wylie is living in a near-slum in poverty. Wouldn't Lady Judith have done something about this if she were friends - not even best friends, but just friendly with Wylie? Lord Adrian supposedly loves Wylie, but he does nothing about it either. Wylie has to walk miles to visit his stables each day to muck-out his horses and he's apparently fine with this. That's hardly the approach of someone who loves her.

The story is of Wyle learning that she's a special snowflake, inheriting the 'good dragon' device, which allows her to transmute into a white dragon and fly around doing good deeds. She will have to battle the evil dragon, because of course there always has to be a balance! Who the hell came up with that trope? I know it goes way back in religious fiction, but that doesn't mean we have to perpetuate it in modern fiction. But this novel follows it faithfully. My guess is that Lady Judith is the evil dragon, but I have no idea since I quit this novel at 60% in. It's a very short novel at 160 pages, but not short enough for me to want to read on. It is undoubtedly the start of a series, which I shall not follow.

The author says she hired a book editor on her first novel but was displeased and went into self-publishing. Good for her. Self-publishing brings its own trials and tribulations though, and some of them I list here. I read at one point, "Afar off, the lowing of cattle as they milled about frantically, afraid for their lives." That was the whole sentence, but it's not well formed, is it? And cattle lowing suggests calm. If they were panicked, something ought to have indicated it - like 'panicked lowing' or something to differentiate it from their ordinary noises.

There were other examples of sentences that seemed to have been changed from the original wording, but not quite changed enough, such as this one: "Judith tried her best comforted her when Nicolas Petford passed away." Another read: "Wylie stopped flying mid-hair" I think that should be mid-air, but I have to ask, where else would one stop flying?!

There was one issue regarding the passage of time which was not well thought out. I read, "The sun was once more beginning to set, just as Wylie was arriving." So she gets to the stable, and she spends some time bringing in the horse's feed, distributing it, and brushing one of them down, and then we read: "The day was rapidly turning to night." I have to say that this is one hell of a long sunset!

Of themselves, these were not story-killers for me. If the story had been entertaining enough I could easily have overlooked a few errors like that. These didn't help, but the real problem was that the story seemed so juvenile to me. Maybe there's an audience for this sort of story. For the author's sake I hope there is, but that audience doesn't include me, especially not for a series. I couldn't get with the shallow romance, or the likewise friendship, or the simplicity of the story-telling. I needed more, so while I wish this author all the best in her career, I will not be following it. I can't commend this one as a worthy read.

Dream of Me by Quinn Loftis

Rating: WARTY!

There were serious problems with this book. Naturally it's YA, and so naturally it has problems - like this is a: hot young special snowflake of a girl whose parents are not in the picture, but a much older less than savory guy is in the picture kind of a YA story.

Most YA books have problems - though thankfully not all. The biggest problem with this one was the antique Sandman, called Brudair in this novel, or Dair for short, and the eighteen-year-old he stalks, who is named Serenity. And yes, the author can joke about it and call it what she likes, but he is a stalker who spies on her in her bedroom, lusts after her, goes into shallow raptures over her beauty, talks to himself about 'making her his', and he is literally centuries old. It makes zero sense that he would be attracted to a teenager for anything other than pure carnal lust, because he really doesn't know her at all. It makes as much sense as a forty-year-old guy falling for a toddler.

His job is supposed to be bringing life-changing and guiding dreams to people on behalf of 'the creator' so yes, this is religious fiction, but it makes little sense the way it's told. It's like Serenity has no choice in how she lives her life. She wants to get out of this Podunk town and live a real life somewhere else, "But destiny has other plans, and it's the Sandman's job to make sure those plans are fulfilled."

In other words, she's screwed. She has no free will. She's being controlled by a much older guy - the "tall muscular Sandman." - like he isn't already threatening enough, dressed in black as he is and "wrapped in shadows." The unanswered question is, if the Sandman was "never meant to have a mate" how come he has such lusts? And for someone so young? How come he didn't plant these ambitions in Serenity when she was much younger? Because then it would be an even sicker story than it already is

The writing is a bit limp, not awfully bad, but hardly great. I read at one point, "Serenity had not come to the decision to leave easily," which really ought to be "Serenity had not come easily to the decision to leave," but things like this are quibbles that are easily ignored if the story is worth reading. This one isn't and I ditched it at maybe 10% in, and moved on to something much more worthy of my time. I can't commend this kind of writing as a worthy read.

vN by Madeline Ashby

Rating: WARTY!

Subtitled "The First Machine Dynasty" this book proved to be part of a series, which I didn't fully realize to begin with since there's nothing on the cover saying "WARNING: This is the first book in a series!" BEWARE!" The 'vN' is from (John) von Neumann, a Hungarian mathematician, and relates to the self-replicating robots which are the main characters in the novel. The two most important of these are Amy and Javier, both of whom are on the run. Javier is pregnant, which begs the unanswered question as to why there are genders with the robots and given that there are, why the males are having the babies. Apparently both genders can have babies, but no females do - at least in what I read, which was about fourth-fifths of this, before I gave up out of lack of interest and frustration with the story not making a whole lot of sense.

The robots are much more organic than we typically envision them, being able to consume plastics and use the materials to grow and when they have an abundance of this 'food' they can create a new, but smaller version of themselves in a sort of parthenogenesis. Amy is infamous for eating her own grandmother, but rather than make her pregnant, all this did was to incorporate her grandmother into Amy's psyche and not to any positive effect, so Amy effectively becomes schizophrenic. How this worked was never explained. Neither was it explained why she didnlt become pregnant from it.

A lot of stuff isn't explained, Amy has a human father but exactly how he was her father isn't gone into. There are areas like this just as there are areas in the text which lack a little something. At one point Javier is tickling Amy and she asks, "Can you try the back of my knee? My dad is ticklish there." But just a couple of lines later Javier is saying, "I can't really get the bottom of your feet if you're standing on 'em, can I?" - it's like the author forgot which part of her he was supposed to be tickling. Later I read "...Is she" followed on the next line by "No it's not that." which means there was zero punctuation at the end of that first time. I don't know of it was meant as an interruption - in which case there ought to have been ellipsis or a dash or something - or if the author simply forgot to add a question mark.

Those were very minor issues, but they didn't help when I was already disliking the novel for its rambling and disjointed approach to story-telling, and its lack of any explanations for how things worked or why they worked that way. It was like the author simply wanted to gloss over this stuff, and have us buy into this world without even offering a pretence of it making any sense, and it rendered the world incomplete and lacking authenticity as well as leaving problematic holes everywhere. I can't commend a book that's had so little attention given to its anatomy as this one has.

The Enchantress by Michael Scott

Rating: WORTHY!

The final book in the series takes off right at the end of volume five, and twins, Sophie and Josh Newman travel back in time to a fabled city of the past where they meet their real parents - so they're told - Isis and Osiris, but you should know by this point that nothing is what it seems in this series. It's a bit like an episode of Mission Impossible where people keep pulling their masks off to reveal that they're really someone else.

Sophie heads off to destroy the ancient city which is required in order for civilization to flourish, and Josh sits on a pyramid, which sounds painful - but which might explain his pissy attitude - and discovers that Clarent and Excalibur are actually part of a quartet, which includes Durendal and Joyeuse. Who knew? There are lots of battles, double-crosses, feints and reveals, and so much talk of silver and gold that I expected Burl Ives to show up singing his Christmas song, but he doesn't.

Overall I consider this entire series to be a worthy read.