His Dark Materials series by Phillip Pullman

Made up of three books (there will be no more in the series), His Dark Materials include: “The Golden Compass”, “The Subtle Knife” and “The Amber Spyglass”. Set in a world as metaphysical as mythical, it is a land seemingly similar to ours. In the first book, a young orphaned girl named Lyra wanders around an “other-Oxford”, discovering deadly secrets about herself and her world. Lyra’s Oxford is a place where bears talk, witches are accepted as normal (if not welcome), and people’s souls are represented by “daemons”, creatures who are with them constantly. In the second book Will, a young boy from our reality, crosses over to Lyra’s world. In the third book, Lyra and Will join forces to a very dark end. The books took me a very long time to get into, but again, I had students who insisted I “had” to read them, so I stuck with it. The level of description is high, almost like Dickens, and the world Lyra inhabits is one of great complexity and many levels. Pullman pulls no punches in these books, and without revealing too much, I urge readers not to get too connected to *any* character in the series. All three books had a sad quality I don’t personally care for, but a tone that fit perfectly with the story that needed to be told. Both the first and second novels end with gasping cliff-hangars, so make sure to have the next volume ready. I warmed up more and more with each book, mostly as I began to “get” what the author was after. Interestingly enough, most students who read the series tell me they like the first book the best and successive books less well. I often compare the series to Harry Potter, saying it is like “J.K Rowling translated by Jeopardy winners”. It becomes much less Harry Potter after the first novel, with Pullman’s real agenda becoming more and more apparent. Phillip Pullman, the son of a Lutheran minister, raised on the Christian allegories in the works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, became a fairly angry atheist. Determined to write the “anti-Christian” young adult novels, he succeeds fairly brilliantly with this elongated tale, and I have to say I found humor in his twisting of the traditional metaphors to bring in his alternate belief system. By the third book, his attack against traditionalism becomes quite clear (I don’t want to offer details and give it away). I would recommend that you be “open” to a variety of religious interpretations before tackling it. Needless to say, this series has been utterly demonized by the extreme Christian fundamentalists, and I can honestly say (for once in my life) that I see their point, even if I don’t necessarily agree with it. But we live in America, a land based in part on religious pluralism and dedicated to free speech. Pullman has written a powerful and intense series with great literary merit. Young people can, and should, read his work and decide for themselves whether their experiences line up with those in the story.