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La Belle Sauvage
Nov. 17th, 2017 07:07 pmPossibly unpopular opinion: I wasn't into it.
To back up, this is the first book of Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust trilogy, in which he returns to the world of the His Dark Materials trilogy. This one is set 11ish years before Golden Compass, when Lyra is a baby; the next one apparently picks up when Lyra is 20.
I am, in general, skeptical of the thing where authors go back to their best-known/best-loved/best-selling series some years later after long gaps, where they revisit stories they had wrapped up and concluded but now want to reopen and reinterpret. At best, you get Tehanu, which I was really angry about when I read it around the 8th grade but have come to understand better as an adult, or Jane Yolen's Dragon's Heart, which was... fine? I guess? but 20 years too late for when I was passionate about the characters. Well, 15 years late. Well, okay, I was still pretty excited, but I can hardly remember now anything that actually happened in it, not the way I remember the first three. At worst you get The One-Armed Queen, Jane Yolen again, WHY, or the Ender's Shadow books, which, like, you know what, I'm not even going to be like "I guess Card needed to pay his mortgage" because fuck him, lose your house, asshole. ANNNyways. I found the end of Amber Spyglass extraordinarily painful and slightly cheating, in that Pullman clearly Wanted That Ending and (in my reading) was willing to somewhat undermine some of his own message up to that point to force it. But it is what it is, I got my feelings about that one out of my system ten years ago very very early in the 30fic project (Lyra's was the fourth story I finished) and I've gone on to happily enjoy many creative daemonverse AUs in fanfic which have continued to explore the trope. I even wrote one, actually. It was fun.
Given all that, it's possible that I should have just let Book of Dust be something that happened somewhere I wasn't, much like Cursed Child or the recent X-Files or anything else that I would have once found inexplicable that I wasn't rushing to consume. (There seem to be... more and more of those as time goes on. Something I didn't used to know about aging.) But for whatever reason I gave it a high priority on my to-read spreadsheet and put myself in the request queue and then there it was, available for download, so.
Actual very spoilery thoughts about this book behind the spoiler cut. Uh, content warning for sexual violence against a minor. ( Read more... )
To back up, this is the first book of Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust trilogy, in which he returns to the world of the His Dark Materials trilogy. This one is set 11ish years before Golden Compass, when Lyra is a baby; the next one apparently picks up when Lyra is 20.
I am, in general, skeptical of the thing where authors go back to their best-known/best-loved/best-selling series some years later after long gaps, where they revisit stories they had wrapped up and concluded but now want to reopen and reinterpret. At best, you get Tehanu, which I was really angry about when I read it around the 8th grade but have come to understand better as an adult, or Jane Yolen's Dragon's Heart, which was... fine? I guess? but 20 years too late for when I was passionate about the characters. Well, 15 years late. Well, okay, I was still pretty excited, but I can hardly remember now anything that actually happened in it, not the way I remember the first three. At worst you get The One-Armed Queen, Jane Yolen again, WHY, or the Ender's Shadow books, which, like, you know what, I'm not even going to be like "I guess Card needed to pay his mortgage" because fuck him, lose your house, asshole. ANNNyways. I found the end of Amber Spyglass extraordinarily painful and slightly cheating, in that Pullman clearly Wanted That Ending and (in my reading) was willing to somewhat undermine some of his own message up to that point to force it. But it is what it is, I got my feelings about that one out of my system ten years ago very very early in the 30fic project (Lyra's was the fourth story I finished) and I've gone on to happily enjoy many creative daemonverse AUs in fanfic which have continued to explore the trope. I even wrote one, actually. It was fun.
Given all that, it's possible that I should have just let Book of Dust be something that happened somewhere I wasn't, much like Cursed Child or the recent X-Files or anything else that I would have once found inexplicable that I wasn't rushing to consume. (There seem to be... more and more of those as time goes on. Something I didn't used to know about aging.) But for whatever reason I gave it a high priority on my to-read spreadsheet and put myself in the request queue and then there it was, available for download, so.
Actual very spoilery thoughts about this book behind the spoiler cut. Uh, content warning for sexual violence against a minor. ( Read more... )
