Marcy recommended this one to me. I usually don't go in for pure fantasy. I wouldn't have such a problem with it were it not for the fact that there seems to be so many people who have difficulty separating fantasy from reality - people who profess belief in magic (or faith-healing, or glossolallia, or alien abductions, or any number of other silly things).
So I'm biased against this genre - and not for any fault of the genre's authors. But I couldn't help liking this story. It was compelling. A world something like our own. A young girl full of aspirations and drawn irresistably to a destiny she doesn't understand. People who live with daemons and whose lives revolve around them - people who cannot live without their daemons.
Lyra (the young girl) becomes embroiled in a mystery and as she strives to unravel it, embarks on an adventure of salvation and discovery. On the way she makes friends (and enemies) and discovers and eventually thwarts a terror so horrible to her and the people of her world that she could not even have imagined it prior to the discovery.
This is the first book of a trilogy. I'm definitely going to finish the others. Now, I gotta get this and Zod Wallop back to Marcy.
