March Books 10) The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman

The second paragraph from Chapter 3:

Meanwhile, she [Serafina Pekkala] looked down at the melting ice-cap, the flooded lowland forests, the swollen sea, and felt heartsick.

Sometimes you shouldn’t revisit former favourites; I have to say that I have been much less blown away by the His Dark Materials trilogy on re-reading than I was first time round. I loved the bits with Mary Malone and the mulefa, but found the land of the dead sequence a bit internally inconsistent – likewise the death of God – and got really a bit fed up with Mrs Coulter and some of the others (eg the Gallivespians ). And while if you are a young teenager in love it does indeed feel as if the entire universe depends on that fact, actually it often turns out to be a temporary phenomenon. Maybe I was just in a bad mood, but it just did not have the same magic for me on second reading.