Take a photo of a barcode or cover
lezreadalot 's review for:
The Amber Spyglass
by Philip Pullman
“And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.”
3.5 stars. I'm emotionally easy, and I have a lot of very vivid and painful emotional nostalgia about the first time I read this and got absolutely clotheslined by some of the events. And my initial love for the characters and worldbuilding and the concept of daemons is doing a lot of heavy lifting. But man, this reads so different from the first book, just of overall the promise of the first book, and not in a good way? I don't know. By the end I was so depressed by the ways the author decided to go with Lyra. Clearly she has to grow up and mature at some point, but the fact that her maturation comes with following Will like an obedient puppy... Ick. Also what's up with the way he wrote Will? I kept trying to keep in mind that he was a traumatised kid, but Pullman seemed to want to write him like a grizzled and grown man, who was capable of intimidating all the adults around him. Seriously, that line about Serafina being too scared to look him in the eye... what the heck. It just made me roll my eyes, and what coulda been a bittersweet young love plotline just got to be distasteful to me, specifically because there was that shade behind Will and Lyra's interactions. Mary is a really interesting character, but her plotline seemed so meandering and a little dull. Mrs. Coulter... look. I have a PARTICULAR distaste for exactly this kind of maternal-instinct-ex-machina, and there's a world in which Pullman could have sold me on it, but not this one.
So the directions the plot went did not satisfy me (and I don't even know if I was wanting/looking forward to anything in particular but THESE choices were meh) but!!! I still have so much affection for the daemon concept. I teared up so many times, and it was almost always because of Lyra and Pan. (Every other time it was because of Balthamos and Baruch.) And the taboos and etiquettes were SO firmly entrenched in my mind that when certain things happened near the end it reeeeeeeally got to me? Idk. It's something that has lived in my imagination ever since I first read the books, and it will continue to. And that's pretty much the entire reason my rating is this high? I will continue to think fondly of this series, but mostly for what it could have been, and the things it made me feel in the first book.