The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials, Book 1

Author: Philip Pullman
Published: 1996, Knopf
399 pages

Philip Pullman is a genius.  I could talk about this book for days, but I'll try to reel it in as best I can.  This is Book #1 in a trilogy, and probably the only one I'll talk about unless I get requests to post about the others.  The other two are The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass.  The truth is, there are so many underlying themes in all of these books that can go right over children's heads, but there is also a fantastic story that everyone can enjoy.

The story follows the child Lyra Belacqua, who is easily my favorite character ever created, as she travels to the North to save her friend and other children who have been captured to endure horrendous experiments at the hands of the Magisterium.  Pullman has created a truly magical world in which polar bears can talk, witches fly through the Northern sky, and all humans have animal counterparts called daemons.

In the midst of Lyra's adventure, Pullman manages to skillfully intertwine elements of modern science, my favorite being the Many-Worlds Theory of quantum physics.  If you're interested in that aspect, an entire book has been written about that alone: The Science of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials.

There has been a lot of controversy about this book, especially when it was being made into a movie in 2007, that stems mostly from Pullman's outspoken atheism.  There are certainly some elements in The Golden Compass that are anti-organized religion, but this theme is not as prevalent in the first book as it is in the second two (and definitely not as prevalent as it is in his latest book: The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ).  And, frankly, the story is good enough that if you didn't know anything about the controversy before reading it, you might completely miss it.

Anyway, I'm glad I'm so obsessed with this book because now I can name my future spawn Lyra instead of "Ponyboy Curtis," which I was planning to do after reading The Outsiders and which is just not a socially acceptable name (no, not even for a librarian's child).  My future child thanks you, Philip Pullman.

The Chocolate War

Author: Robert Cormier
Published: 2004, Knopf (this version)
272 pages

Originally published in 1974, this book established Cormier’s strong footing in the YA market.  A lot of people are really crazy about this book, but I found myself slightly unimpressed with it.  It is certainly an entertaining read (I got through it in a matter of hours), but I just can’t relate to it as much as I can relate to other YA books that I’ve read.

The book is about a kid named Jerry Renault taking on The Vigils — a secret society that rules his elite boys’ prep school.  Jerry asks himself throughout the novel “Do I dare disturb the universe?” and he ends up disturbing at least his school’s universe when he rebels against The Vigils, with disastrous results.

Cormier raises some interesting questions about human nature, and the reason many reviewers have loved this book is because of his “uncompromising portrait of human cruelty” (School Library Journal) or his “good sense for the realistic” (Bestsellers).  I, on the other hand, think the portrait Cormier paints is so overwhelmingly negative and harsh that it becomes unbelievable.  There are many villains in the novel, and none of them have the redeeming qualities that would make them human.  Maybe I’m just lucky, but I’ve never met anybody as “bad” as Brother Leon or Archie, the two main villains Cormier creates.

The Chocolate War is nonetheless worth a read because a) it’s a classic, b) it’s entertaining, and c) maybe you’ll feel lucky for never having met anybody like Cormier’s villains (Come on, your ex-boyfriend really isn’t that bad).