Lucas Stoffel

The Subtle Knife introduces Will Parry, and everything changes. Where The Golden Compass was Lyra's book — fierce, adventurous, set in a single extraordinary world — The Subtle Knife is about the spaces between worlds, and the boy who can cut through them. Book Review.

Philip Pullman wrote a children's book where the villains are the Church, the weapon is truth, and the hero is an eleven-year-old girl who lies better than anyone in literature. The Golden Compass is the most subversive, most ambitious, and most beautifully written fantasy novel for young readers ever published, and I will fight about this.

The Book of Dust (La Belle Sauvage) is a prequel. Lyra is a baby, placed in the care of the nuns at Godstow Priory. Malcolm Polstead is eleven, the son of innkeepers, curious and brave and utterly ordinary in the way that Pullman's best characters are ordinary — which is to say, not at all. Malcolm's daemon Asta hasn't settled yet. He works at the inn, spies on the scholars who drink there, and becomes increasingly aware that the Magisterium's Consistorial Court of Discipline