I can't believe I'm giving this book 2 stars...His Dark Materials shattered my heart as a kid... I've been dreaming of a book about adult Lyra ever since but this was one of the biggest disappointment of 2020 already.It took me 3 months to finish this book. A book I had been dreaming about for years...(view spoiler)[ It broke my heart to see Lyra and Pan fight but the reasons are so vague and barely explained. I'm hoping things will make more sense in the next book. I hated the attempted rape sc...

Northern Lights is quite possibly my favourite book of all time, and I actually really liked La Belle Sauvage despite the mixed reviews it got, so I was pretty confident that I'd love The Secret Commonwealth. Grown-up Lyra?? I pre-ordered it and started reading it the minute it landed in my Kindle. And... I really didn't like it.Judging from the reviews on here, I'm in the minority, and I'm not mad about that. I love the world of His Dark Materials and I will always admire Pullman as one of my a...

The Secret Commonwealth continues Lyra's story, many years after the conclusion of His Dark Materials, with a young woman adrift from her deamon and starting to understand who she really is in the world. It's a story about acceptance, challenging the rules left by the old, and self discovery.As always, Pullman's writing is a joy to read. He can draw me back into this world effortlessly, as if I've never been away from Lyra and Pantalaimon. But she's not the girl I'm used to seeing. At the start

Hey this review has spoilers so.I was really wanting to love this book, and His Dark Materials is basically still my favourite series ever. I don't really know where to begin, so I'm just going to make dot points.- I'm pretty disappointed- Why did chapter 31 even need to exist- why is it necessary to the plot to have the attempted rape of the main female character? The parts at the end are filled with unintentional irony. She says she shouldn't have to expect that like Pullman is a massive femin...

Why the hell are people rating this book one star when it's not even out yet and there's no way they could possibly have read it?? It makes me so mad ¬¬

"lyra silvertongue as a twenty year old" "lyra silvertongue as a twenty year old" "lyra silvertongue as a twenty year old" "LYRA SILVERTONGUE AS A TWENTY YEAR OLD"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! am actually losin me shit, one of the reasons why la belle sauvage wasn't as good as hdm was because lyra wasn't in it (well i mean she was, but she was 8 months old) but this.... BUT THIS

Oh, I was so excited to read this, I've been hoping for a book after The Amber Spyglass for almost 20 years, but I hated this. No book has made me more furious in a long time. The more of this review I write, the madder I realize I am.I read The Golden Compass when I was 11, the same age as Lyra. It was the perfect book at the right time for me, it's still a perfect book, and coming after that, The Secret Commonwealth was a shot to the gut. I went into it with my secret impossible hope the same

687 pages and Mr. Pullman still left me hanging at the top of the highest cliff ever. How long to wait now until we find out what happens to Lyra, Pan and Malcolm? This is a fascinating way to write a series. Book one was set when Lyra was a baby and this book, part 2, is set after the events in His Dark Materials. A series within a series. Very interesting. The Secret Commonwealth is full of action, lots of deaths, and an almost rape. Pullman is not writing for children in this series. However

I count myself very lucky to have been able to read an advance copy of this book - thank you Penguin Random House for making that happen!Think back to when you were little and a new book in a series you loved (most people insert Harry Potter here) was due out, think of the excitement, the anticipation, the thrill of holding that volume in your hands. That is how I felt holding this book. And that feeling was rewarded tenfold. Pullman had worried me a little with La Belle Sauvage... He didn't see...

Here is my video review: https://youtu.be/USZMOjCprqYHis Dark Materials and La Belle Sauvage have been such an immense delight. They have brought lightness into dark times. It was with much delight that I opened this book. Lyra, Pan, Malcom, and Alice are all back in this book. However, the book is extremely dark and has lost its magical touch. The book spends the first 200-300 pages in some philosophical debates, and I was expecting it to pick up the pace from there, but it didn't. This book wa...

Oh, the disappointment….While I appreciate good representation and diversity in the stories that I read, I acknowledge that even in 2019 not all books can be up to my own standards. So if a book is well written, has a solidly planned story, has good pacing and keeps me interested, I will consider it a good book even if it doesn’t contain any good female characters or POC or LGBT+ representation (I definitely won’t like it as much as a good book with good representation, but you know). Bottom lin...

A story that misses the magic of its daemon. Overly long and disappointing in payoff, with too obvious references to the current world to be enchantingYou used to be optimistic. You used to think whatever we did would turn out well. I used to be young was all she could find to say.The pacingAll these things that are changing... like ice breaking under your feet.Lyra depressed could have also been the title of this hefty addition to the His Dark Materials universe of Philip Pullman. Initially I f...

the book is a fascinating experience full of mystery, emotion, memorable scenes, and real world relevance. the book is a disappointing experience that has somehow lost the magic of its predecessor, let alone the original trilogy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯while remaining true to his basic belief system that organized religion - Christianity, in prior books - is at the root of much of the evils of the world, in Secret Commonwealth the author widens his net to catch the fanatical side of Islam as well. I appreciat...

Something strange just happened. After having just read La Belle Sauvage and also having just read the original His Dark Materials trilogy (for the second time, but again, recently), I have come to the conclusion that this might be my favorite of all five books.Weird, right?I mean, I liked the original trilogy well enough but I never went gaga over it. Maybe it was about the problem of agency. Or perhaps it was a few other issues. But I never disliked all the wonderful pan-religiosity, the many

https://wordnerdy.blogspot.com/2019/1...Normally I don't prioritize books by white cis male authors, but I'm still interested in the adventures of Lyra--now a twenty year old college student--so figured I'd make an exception. And then I got to page 187 and said "oh, no. Oh, gross" OUT LOUD. This is what I get for trusting male authors: a character who is "in love" with a girl he's known since she was a baby, who was attracted to her when she was a young teen WHO HE WAS TEACHING, but now it's oka...

As a huge fan of Philip Pullman, I take no pleasure in reporting that The Secret Commonwealth is a massive disappointment. This novel, which begins every bit the worthy successor to Pullman’s marvelous His Dark Materials trilogy, slowly and tragically dissolves into a narrative so desultory and dull that it may as well not exist. Or it’s brilliant in a way I can’t comprehend––but I don’t think so.Rarely do I feel the need to take vengeance on a novel when reviewing it, but this one brought m...

What a fascinating mess that was. The opening feels a lot like a Golden Compass* replay, with Lyra back in Oxford, and a student now herself. Except instead of missing children, the mystery we're meant to be exercised about this time is...something to do with roses in the Middle East? Which you might think would feel remote and abstract but oh boy, you'd be amazed how many people Lyra knows suddenly have an intense personal interest in the subject and a reason to talk to her about it. In the mea...

11/17/19 - FINALLLLLY! I finished this chunker! Time to tell you my thoughts.Alright, so it's no secret that the book that I am most bitter about not enjoying in this world is La Belle Sauvage. It's my most liked and commented on review on this site out of the hundreds upon hundreds that I have read and loved, liked or loathed down through the years.That being said, I was intensely wary of reading this book. Albeit hopeful still. And now, after spending a hulking 11 days on reading this tome, I

In a similar but much much better world this awful novel was never written.My wife and I both loved His Dark Materials and consider it one of our absolute favourite stories ever. Our daughter is named Lyra after the protagonist of that series (and this new novel). We both thoroughly enjoyed La Belle Sauvage too and were greatly looking forward to this one. We bought it in hardback and on kindle. The paper copy just a keepsake of what would surely be an amazing book.To say I am disappointed in th...

Definitely the most mature of Pullman's works involving daemons - the two trilogies of His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust - The Secret Commonwealth remarkably responds to the main criticisms of the previous book in the series in a way that is entirely consistent with the story. The book carries on the story of La Belle Sauvage but with the interlude of Lyra's adventures in His Dark Materials, and we now find her as an undergraduate at Oxford while Malcolm is an academic and - dashingly - a