The Golden Compass

Brandi Meineke, Collection Development Specialist

9/6/2011 4:09:26 PM
The Golden Compass is the first book in the His Dark Materials series. Author Philip Pullman creates a beautiful and wonder-filled world parallel to our own. This series is likely to be an instant favorite for avid fantasy readers. Intelligent ice-bears rule the northern territories, making armor from “sky-metal.” Explorers search for portals to other worlds, occasionally finding them. Something or someone called Gobblers are stealing children off the street. A mysterious substance known as Dust motivates many people to do wonderful and terrible things. A young girl named Lyra gets thrown into a multitude of adventures, through which the reader gets to thoroughly explore this amazing land. And most magical of all are what they call daemons.

In this world every single human being has what is known as a daemon. These are best described as a fragment of the human’s soul personified as an animal. Daemons and their human are so connected that an injury that happens to one will be felt by the other. When the humans are young the daemons can alter their form to be anything the child imagines. There are a lot of rules and customs that relate to how humans and daemons interact. A human can touch and talk to their own daemon as much as they want. Often the daemon serves as a sort of advisor to the human. Daemons can touch each other, and often do when their humans are fighting or playing with one another. The greatest taboo in this world is for one person to touch another person’s daemon. It is rare for a human to even talk to someone else’s daemon.

Many times in this series very philosophical and in-depth critiques of religion occur. From a teaching perspective, this could be problematic if the whole class were to read and discuss this novel. However, it does inspire a great deal of critical thinking, which makes it a great book to keep on the shelf for students to read individually.

This is a very thought-provoking series. Questioning the ruling power (in this case a theocracy) is a major theme. This would be a great independent read for any fantasy loving middle or high schooler.