The Amber Spyglass / Philip Pullman

4.25 stars out of 5

Will is the bearer of the knife. Now, accompanied by angels, his task is to deliver that powerful, dangerous weapon to Lord Asriel - by the command of his dying father.

But how can he go looking for Lord Asriel when Lyra is gone? Only with her help can he fathom the myriad plots and and intrigues that beset him.

The two great powers of the many worlds are lining up for war, and Will must find Lyra, for together they are on their way to battle, an inevitable journey that will even take them to the world of the dead...

I’m rating this at 4 stars, but really I feel like it should be 4.25 or 4.3 or something like that.  Although I didn’t love it as much as the first two books, I found it to be a realistic and satisfying ending to the trilogy.

It was great to see Iorek Byrnison, the armoured, talking polar bear, again.  He gets to be the voice of the natural world, warning against doing something “just because you can” and about unknown consequences of actions.  Pullman had managed to include so many interesting creatures to inhabit all of his parallel universes!  Witches, dæmons, angels, spectres, gyptians, ghosts, just to mention a few.

Lyra & Will are on the cusp of adulthood in this book, but have already taken on adult-level responsibilities.  They handle them much better than I would have at the same age!  But didn’t we all feel “all grown up” at that stage?  I couldn’t understand why adults didn’t see me the same way!  Their reluctance to trust me with any kind of burden seemed very insulting to me at 17 or 18 years.

I can also see why very religious people wouldn’t care for Pullman’s worldview, but since I’m not a religious person, I was perfectly comfortable with it.  A recommended series.