I feel like a HUGE weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I am FINALLY, FINALLY finished with His Dark Materials. Not that I didn’t enjoy reading them, but I have to admit that the last installment, The Amber Spyglass dragged on for a seriously long time. Especially since I left it at home after Winter Break. Brilliant, I know. This is not an unusual experience for me. With pretty much any series except for Harry Potter (of course) and The Lord of the Rings, I get bored if I read them all back to back without a significant break. This time I did have a break, but it was right in the middle of the book. That’s always super annoying, but this time it was worse because this was an entire series I was trying to finish up. Anyway. Time to discuss. The disembodied arm is mine.
I’m trying to put my boredom with this book aside, because I honestly think that most of it can be attributed to the massive gap I had between reading the first chunk and the last. So. Will and Lyra are still best friends forever, crazy stuff is still happening with Dust, and a few different worlds are involved just for good measure. Not only would it be pretty difficult for me to sum up the plot of this one, but I also just don’t really want to. So suffice it to say that a lot of intense and awesome stuff happens, and a few of our old friends from the first two books come back. The ending is perfect. Not a hundred percent happy, but exactly happy enough and sad enough to be believable. I was frustrated and cried a bit, which is always a sign of a good ending for me. Lyra and Will continue to develop as characters, and they grow up a lot in this one, and in pretty serious ways. Spoiler alert: Lyra’s daemon, Pantalaimon, “settles” which means that he takes the form that he’ll keep for the rest of Lyra’s life. He’s a pine marten. I didn’t know what that was exactly, so I googled it. Here’s what a pine marten looks like:
Totally adorable, and pretty perfect for Lyra, I say.
Back to plot. Things with Dust get resolved, but not without a serious battle scene and lots of drama. Lord Asriel crops back up and contributes to the end of things in a pretty big way, as does Mary Malone. The more I write about this book, the more things I remember that I really liked about it. So read it. Right away. Just don’t take a massive break right before the end like I did.
So does God get killed? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Was I offended by any anti-religious stuff? (I wasn’t, which isn’t surprising at all.) I’ll never tell. Because I want you to go, right now, to a bookstore and buy this trilogy.