I’m convinced that the only reason these books aren’t widely acknowledged as the best YA fantasy series of all time is because trying to explain the plot – in an attempt to get others to read the books – makes you sound like a complete nutjob. With Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, etc. it’s easy! “There’s a school for young witches and wizards.” “The Greek Gods are real and they have kids with magical powers.”
With the His Dark Materials Trilogy, it’s like… “Well, it’s kind of like a retelling of Paradise Lost that celebrates humankind’s original sin, but set in an alternate universe where your soul manifests in the form of an animal that changes shape until you hit puberty, and there’s this girl who has this special compass with little symbols on it and a warrior polar bear king…”
I’ve tried to explain the overall themes and plot of this series so many times in brief. And the best I can come up with, at the end of it all, is “you just have to give it a shot, for the vibes.” But if anyone else has a better summary of it, I’d love to hear how you’ve been telling people about these books.
by ATXBookLover
35 Comments
Not only is this series one of my all-time favorites… I was extremely happy with the HBO series! I felt that they got much of it perfecty.
I think you’re trying too hard to sell the entire series and should just focus on the first one. If that hooks people, then they’ll probably read the other books, too.
So keep it simple: “Young orphan Lyra lives in a world where souls live outside the bodies of people and they take the shape of animals. One day she’s practically adopted by a wealthy woman and right when she has to leave her best friend gets kidnapped. She soon realises her adoptive mother has something to do with the kidnapping and she has to escape and travel the world to find him back.” Something like that.
‘A young girl embarks on a perilous journey to rescue kidnapped children and gets caught up in a conspiracy involving parallel universes’
Also:
>these books aren’t widely acknowledged as the best YA fantasy series of all time
They are more widely acknowledged in the UK, for obvious reasons.
It’s been a while since I read these but I think you’re right…it’s difficult to convey everything in a short summary. I know I recommended it to a friend who’s a huge Milton fan and basically sold it on the *Paradise Los*t aspect. I think different aspects can be emphasized depending on who you’re trying to appeal to. But I also like the summaries others have already provided here.
And funnily enough I used this as a comp title while querying (it worked; I got requests) but my book also defies easy summary lol–which is a whole other issue.
I feel the books were relatively popular, but when the movie was absolutely terrible they never took off to a wider audience the way the other series you mentioned did.
Adore this series! Waiting impatiently for book 3 if the most recent trilogy
Two more likely reasons, especially in an American context: They’re much more challenging reads than *Harry Potter* or most other “competitors,” and their politics and theology are absolute anathema to the American right, especially the religious right.
It follows the tradition of well written children’s literature that aims for a higher level of quality that what you would expect. Same thing with Tales of Earthsea. I think the other reason why the books are not as popular is because of the philosophical aspects being somewhat controversial.
“Two kids try to kill God with a knife”
That’s the wedge. From there you expand on who the kids are, what the knife does, what “God” means in the setting, etc. and the rest of the plot and theme follows from there.
“It’s about a girl who goes on a multiversal quest to find her father, and her soul lives outside her as a shapeshifting animal companion”.
That’s all you need. When trying to get somebody into Harry Potter you don’t start with how it’s a disection of fascism and how it is both born and carried within a society by priviledge and ignoramce while usually being directed by a deeply insecure and flawed person who has entirely dfferent motives than racial purity or nationalism, all theough the lense of a private school as a microcosm of society, it’s class structures, it’s cultural divisions, and it’s history.
His Dark Materials is magnificent, but it’s magnificence is to be discovered, not described. As you said, that’s how you fail to transmit the interest. Just give them a nugget of how the story begins and what is intriguing about it.
I’m convinced its because the plot of His Dark Materials is “it’s an explicit deconstruction and takedown of Christianity”
Love these books. I appreciated that the person who told me to read it gave me almost no info about it all…”just read it, it’s good, you’ll see”. I liked the discovering and unfolding through the book learning what the daemons were (at first I was like ‘what is this?’ Then it slowly started to make sense what they were), and I remember the multiverse traveling being a “Woah!” moment…but that’s just me. It’s hard to resist coming up with a good synopsis when people ask “but what is it *about*?” I agree that the HBO series did a great job.
I’m in the opposite camp. I have trouble understanding why people keep praising these books. I might have read them too late, in my late 20ies, but I did not like it at all. I kept pushing through, because it had to get good sooner or later if so many people love it, but I run out of books before that would have happened. Now, 10 ish years later I can only recall maybe a handful of scenes and even those are mostly from the tv series. I have absolutely no recollection of the second half of the story.
Do not get me wrong, I’m happy for you guys, but I really do not see what you see.
Don’t forget the killing God/anti theism themes.
Pretty sure that’s why the first movie bombed so bad at least in the US. Glad the show is doing so well though!!
(Once my kid was at a chapter book reading level, I tried to convince him to read His Dark Materials by excitedly explaining killing God was a plot point, along with all the other cool stuff. We’re atheist, obviously. He still hasn’t read it yet, which sucks because these books were SO important to me at his age. But he also just doesn’t read much anymore)
I love the Golden Compass, but not the other two. I couldn’t even finish the last one.
I am not sure I would consider these books as YA. The quality of the writing, the subtlety and sophistication of the themes, these are 100% books for adults, that just happen to have young adults as the protagonists. Pullman himself has said he had no particular target audience in mind when writing them. I think it is just the marketing department at the publisher that decided to push them as YA books because they figured they would make more money that way.
The third is a bit heavy handed, but I enjoyed them. These are YA books for sure.
There’s a prequel trilogy out now (the first 2 books anyway) that you’ll love if you loved the OG series!
I was one of those kids whose parents didn’t monitor what I read at all and I remember a friend’s (religious) mom calling my mom because I had told her kid that I was reading a book about “killing God” and she wanted to make sure my mom knew about it. I loved those books and they were so formative to my taste! I think about those creatures with the wheel things allll the time.
I’m not sure it’s truly YA. The characters may be, but the themes are (or may be) much deeper/obscure, and not in a “you have to read between the lines” way.
The plot is easier: it’s the old “girl meets boy, girl’s parents are absolute monsters, boy’s parents are variously absent, girl and boy team up to kill God” story.
Great series but the end felt so rushed and half assed I have a hard time recommending it to people.
I loved the first book, but honestly the second drags pretty badly. Lyra just kind of sits in the “ghost” haunted world doing nothing for a long, long period of the book, and a lot of kids trying to get through it are going to struggle keeping their attention.
I was fortunate to read this in college as required reading for my upper division Milton class. I remember being very impressed with the quality of the writing.
Someday I will find a secluded bench in the botanical gardens at Oxford and bawl my eyes out for hours.
I loved this series. The last book didn’t really fit in with the rest, for me. I liked the boldness of it, for sure. Just that the expectations set up by the other books wasn’t met.
Also, not sure how the third book would read to someone who wasn’t aware of the Ancient Greek view of the afterlife. (Maybe it also reflected others, but it reflects that one for sure.)
I think you’re over-complicating it.
“It’s an alternate universe where human souls actually physically manifest as an animal, kind of like a pet. And the main character is a girl called Lyra with a daemon/soul called Pan, and she has a magic compass that helps her figure out the truth. Also there are talking bears.”
That’s what sold me as a 12-year-old when the first book came out.
I think you could do something similar with HP and Percy Jackson.
With His Dark Materials, you could easily say “it’s an alternate version of earth where everyone is born with a spirit animal that they can talk to.”
I wish there were more. Great trilogy
And the Catholic Church went apeshit about the series and did everything they could to undermine it.
If you liked it you might like *Keys to the Kingdom* by Garth Nix
It’s YA fiction about the daughter of a character who starts a war with heaven in order to kill what most readers will understand as an unflattering depiction of the Christian God. That’s why it doesn’t get it’s credit. It’s not just scary to the type of fringe Christians who get all “Satanic Panic” about Harry Potter. It’s an outright indictment of foundational beliefs of Christianity and the authoritarian tendencies “all” branches inhereted from the Catholic Church.
I, a big fat queer with religious trauma, sell it to other big fat queers with religious trauma like so:
“some assholes try to invade Heaven to kill God and eliminate the original sin, but the protagonists realize that the original sin is dope actually, also there’s talking animals and shit”
Gets em every time
I’ve always thought it was because it’s deeply anti-organised religion and has themes about how untrustworthy parents can be.
To be honest, I wouldn’t even describe it as YA. It’s one of the best fantasy series ever.
I first read this series as an 8 year old who knew absolutely nothing about Christianity, sounds like I need to reread them lol
These books were extremely controversial in certain sects because of their content. If the witchcraft complaint about Harry Potter was a big deal, the “attack God” plot, mature themes, and sexual content in later books triggered a lot of people “worried about the children” and relatively large organizations like the Catholic Church, which did not like the subtext.
But you’re right, they’re much better than the rest of the YA of that period, and deserve to sit alongside A Wizard of Earthsea as “that thing you like but better.”