Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have had these books on my shelf for a number of years, having never gotten around to them. They should have stayed on the shelf, as I now know. I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, so I recognized many of the tropes that Pullman tries to pull off. I must say that Holly Lisle pulls off the multiverse much better than he does, and that's not saying a whole lot. Like most people here, I found myself drawn in by the first book. That one was well written, if a bit heavy handed in how good Lyra was, how brave she was, how she could do anything even if it was previously impossible for anyone else to do - like break her father out of his Svalbard prison. However, the books declined in quality from the first page of the second book. Will takes it much too easily when he finds that he has committed his first murder, especially for a boy of 12. As a reader, I am willing to suspend belief quite a bit, but this particular plot point snapped that thread for me. Once that was lost, it was extremely difficult for me to engage myself with the text once again. As far as the ending goes, what a disappointment. It seems as if the third book was trying to tell three vastly different stories. Frankly, if Pullman had created a novel entirely about Mary Malone slipping into the world that she did and studying it in a scientific capacity with no way to return, that would have kept my interest much more than his rabid defamation of Christianity. Also, Pullman fails to deliver on the cohesion of comparing Mary to the serpent, Lyra to Eve, and Will to Adam. There was no offering there by Mary of something to tempt Lyra with as happened in the Garden of Eden. Without this crucial component, there is no way that Lyra can be Eve reincarnate. The propaganda that Pullman purports as truth would be all right if he was claiming it as his own, and that if others believed it, that would be okay. However, he very cleverly lulls the uncareful reader into believing that what he is saying is a universal truth. I had no idea that atheism was so nihilistic, yet that is the view I came away with when I finished this trilogy. I would never recommend these books to anyone. Rather, I would steer them towards better fantasy novels - like Rowling, Tolkein, Robin McKinley, Patricia McKillip, and Ursula K le Guin.