Title: The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, No 1) this is the revised review
Author: Philip Pullman
Average number of words per page: more than 100
STORY:
21 readers have rated this story.
Average story rating: 7.82/10.0
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ILLUSTRATIONS:
21 readers have rated the illustrations.
Average illustration rating: 6.13/10.0
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Story Rating
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4.5 out of a possible 10.0
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Book review by: Erin (Rinny)
age: 14Review submitted on 08/20/2004 at 15:19:47
list all 21 reviews for this book
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Illustrations Rating
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5.0 out of a possible 10.0
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Erin (Rinny) writes the following about The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, No 1) this is the revised review :
Ok, I know before I wrote a pretty harsh review on this book. I thought about it and realized it wasn't that bad. I still would not recomend it as one of my favorite books, but there were several things I did like about it, and since I am a writer I know how it feels to have your work criticised. I meant no offense to Mr. Pullman and even though his books are not my favorites there are plenty of people who love them and they don't totally stink. I take back what i said about learning how not to write, and hope than no one was offended.
The plot for this book is complicated. It starts with this girl named Lyra who lives at a place called Oxford. she lives sort of a carefree life with the professers and occasionally her uncle visits her. Soon she discovers that there is a group of people doing gruesome experiments on children and their daemons (Which are like animal manifestations of your soul) in the far north. She must stop them in order to save her best friend. On her adventure she meets a witch, and a talking bear who become her friends. Im not going to tell you how it ends, Im just going to say what I did and didn't like and let you decide whether or not to read it. This is one of those 'every thing is just like earth except.....' Books. I have never really liked those because the writer usually can't explain how it is possible that a whole other world independent from ours is so much like ours that they are almost identical. Another thing is that throughout the whole story Lyra was sort of confusing. sometimes it was hard to understand her motivations, and she seemed stupid at some times and smart at others. I don't think that was how she was meant to seem. It was never explained why the people of that world had daemons and we don't, or why there were witches there and not here. This book was sort of preachy. I don't really like preachy books, they sort of annoy me. The ending was sad, too sad for me, and it seemed to me that there were too many unexplained mysteries at the end of the book. True it's a trilogy, but I still think that no questions were answered and it disapoints me when I don't get to find out the answers at the end of a book.
Now for what I did like: There beginning was sort of exciting, I would almost call it gripping, but not quite. I don't think that Phillip Pullman is a bad writer, in fact I think I would have put this book on my favorite list if he had just done a few things differently about the plot and explained more. All of his action scenes are good, but you can't build a story on action scenes alone. I did like the relationship between Lyra and her daemon. They were good interacting characters.
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