Thursday, August 04, 2005

Book Review: His Dark Materials Continued




What? Its he truth. I mean, its the first book! Its not the second or third where it really counts! The first books of any trilogies are always a bit lacking since it is the introduction to the whole trilogy right? So anyway, yeah it got a 9 on my watch.

Now for book two. Book two, The Subtle Knife, introduces to us a lot more characters. Say for an example Will. He is a boy, around the same age with Lyra which is 12 by the way. Anyway, his world is not the same as Lyra's as it is set in our own world where you don't see souls eating Frosties and what not. So anyway, the first chapter tells us off Will's life. Currently, he was sneaking back into his own house after dropping off his mother at a neighbours house to get a box of letter from his missing father. There, he found out that two people were already in his house. Okay i myself was confused with this part since the two people, as far as i can remember, played no important role except for the fact that Will ran away and found a portal leading to another world which so happened to be the on where Lyra followed her father into the OTHERWORLD. Of course that doesn't mean there's only two worlds. There's lots more where that came from, lots more!

Anyway, the story continues onwards to how Will met Lyra, how Will received guradianship of THE KNIFE! Its called the Subtle Knife (duh). Its a knife with two edges, one so sharp it can cut trhough anything. The other, so subtle it can rip the reality barrier in two and thus open up a portal to any world. Then the story proceeds onwards to tell us how they got into trouble and used the knife and all that. Oh did i mention Will lost two fingers?

Now the thing i like bout this second book is the characters. Phillip managed to make them.. real. Its got great character build up. You feel what they feel and al that, get my drift? Its awesome. Plus he keeps to a constant storyline and has this way of writing that makes it impossible to put the book down. I'd give it a full ten out of ten. Or in the words of nighteyes, a twelve out of ten.

2 comments:

Bal said...

How DARE you. Book One was just as good, if not better, than Book Two! The only reason people felt sorry for Lee Scoresby was because he was exposed from Book One! And simply put, there are two reasons why Book One is just as good as Book Two

1) The main character was still Lyra, meaning she got more time.
2) Iorek Byrnison! Armored bears!

I rest my case.

Aki said...

How DARE you.

Well I agree with Bal. I got hooked from Book I. Though the introduction was rather boring to me, coz Lyra was just hiding there with Pan and listening to these people talking bout nobody knows what. It was a bit confusing... And annoying too. I had to force myself to read till... I can't remember which part, that was years ago.

But once you get to the interesting part (varies between diff readers =p), the WHOLE three episodes are great. HDM has been my favourite ever since and still is.

PS: But with Harry Potter, I was hooked right from the very first sentence in the very first book ^^