A review by ailsaod
Northern Lights by Philip Pullman

adventurous dark mysterious slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

 This book wasn't what I'd expected and I'm not sure what to think about it. I feel like Pullman writes children far more accurately than most authors - Lyra is a feral little gremlin and not in a mostly sweet, occasionally troublesome way most people would portray her. Like this girl has been left mostly to her own devices to cause havoc for most of her life and you can tell! She is a very real feeling character who has believable flaws and is very resourceful but is still very much a child out of her depth.

The whole daemon thing was unlike anything else I had read before and was very interesting(if you aren't in the know 'daemons' are an animal representation of a human's soul that everyone has). The book is set in another version of Earth and Pullman has fully integrated much of the aspects he has added and considered the implications this would have for people's behaviour and culture.

This book does contain some darker elements (a lot of kidnapping of children, unethical experimentation and child death so that's FUN) and I found it impressive that Pullman can communicate the awfulness of the experiments being done in the arctic when it is based on things that are completely unknowable and impossible to us. In the opening chapters of the book a character makes an shocked remark about a child in a photograph being 'an entire child' which made me laugh at the time because isn't that a strange thing to say haha how amusing. Having finished the book I'm now like 'OH NO! That's not funny anymore! :0'

ALSO I am majorly reassessing everything about
Lord Asriel
because what is that man on??
Like I knew Mrs Coulter was going to be bad because of the way she was introduced as too good to be true but everyone in the book is like 'oh yea Lord Asriel is a great guy! The best guy ever!' and then when he finally gets more than like five pages on screen he's actually maybe worse than Mrs Coulter and does some casual murder just because. I thought he was going to be the typical 'Victorian father who is allergic to openly caring' but ACTUALLY it was a cover for 'religious extremist who is planning on wrecking everything'. All I can say that I guess they are the villain power couple I wasn't expecting but got anyway
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