Let me tell you a tale, about a young girl called Pippa and when she was about 13 she fell in love with a book series by Garth Nix. She read them all many many many times and really loved them and the characters so much. Fast forward to 2021, I was looking through Audible deciding what I wanted to listen to for my car journey to work, the absolute rock star I am. Something in the back of my mind told me I needed to revisit the Old Kingdom with Sabriel, so I downloaded them and listened to the smooth, delicious voice of Tim Curry here are my thoughts:
Sabriel
I literally have no words to describe how much I love this book, Sabriel is a character I really looked up to when I was younger. She is thrown into a position she feels she is not ready for and yet she thrives, stumbling and feeling her way. The way that Garth Nix describes the world stayed with me in some part of my brain, as when Tim was soothing me with his melodious voice, I was transported back to where I remember imagining what it would look like, Abhorsens house, the wall, what Mogget looked like and how the dead are portrayed. I will not spoil the books as I am trying to encourage my wife to read them.
Quick sidebar, when I read these books when I was younger, zombie films weren’t exactly on my film list, so it is weird to think what I thought they looked like with minimal outside interference. Crazy how it can change based on what you watch as you get older.
I loved everything about this book, the same however could not be said for the next one.
Lirael
Now I should say that I did enjoy this book and I loved it so much when I was younger, however, now I see Lirael as a sulky teenager (lol at myself) she often is just so… whiney. Luckily she has a fantastic companion throughout most of the book The Dog. I also had a slight issue with this book because she is not Sabriel. I was very attached to that character growing up. Although that being said it was amazing to “see” other areas of the Old Kingdom so it was still nice to travel around and experience more and you got the feeling that the villain in this book was going to be the big bad of the series which concluded in the next book (well until he released Goldenhand)
Abhorsen
This was the culmination of the previous books, (just to put things in perspective, this book came out in 2003 and the aforementioned Goldenhand was released in 2016, so quite some time to carry on with the series - there were other prequels etc in between, but I have not read these yet). In a series of 3, I would rate this one as second place.
If I can ask anything of you, give this a read, or if you have teenagers let them read this, Sabriel is a strong role model type character and I think there is a lot to be said about the themes of this book.