I really love the format of this and the other short book by Pullman. Little cotton-bound hardbacks with realia in them (a pull-out map of Oxford in this one, a full-on board game in the other). It really wouldn't work as a paperback - and if you're reading the e-book versions, you're missing out! ( )

A 2003 collection of material related to the His Dark Materials series.

C (Indifferent).

Half of the book is a short story, printed in enormous font to hide the fact that it's a very short short story. It's harmless, but not particularly interesting. The rest of the book is stuff that might have made sense as bonus features at the end of "Amber Spyglass," or as something to put on a website. Printing it as a book (not to mention marketing it as a novella) feels like a con.

(Jul. 2023) ( )

A new tale of Lyra, set sometime after her adventures in the multiverse. The story was interesting, but the real meat of this volume is the map of Oxford in Lyra's world, and the reproductions of various collected ephemera of characters from His Dark Materials. ( )

I wasn’t particularly impressed by this short novella when I first read it (see my review of the standard edition for an examination of the major narrative and themes), but I hoped that Chris Wormell’s woodcut-inspired illustrations would enliven the story. I still remain disappointed with the lack of Oxford exploration in the story (seriously misleading title!), but thankfully the accompanying pictures did a decent job of brightening the narrative. The cover in particular is a luscious introduction, depicting Lyra and Pan overlooking the sunset-drenched Oxford in which they run rampant, which shows a particular care by Wormell to set the restive but eventually action-packed tone of the forthcoming story. Within the pages, the bulk of his illustrations are mixed format, some being interleaved as full-page pastiches and others being inset with the margins, with a final few scattered artfully within the text. All of the imagery ties in neatly to the story and Wormell’s signature style accents the slightly antiquated narrative tone well, which makes for a much more engaging read than the straight-text version. In particular, I found the full-page images to be the stunners of the volume, as the careful composition and action depicted therein allowed for a fully immersive visual experience, but even the smaller images utilising imagery from the natural world (birds, greenery, etc) were a lively visual treat. Concluding the volume were a selection of admittedly random “other things” that may or may not be connected to the story told in the book. Considering the large scope of Pullman’s worldbuilding, the concept of gathering some literary and visual detritus (if you will) is actually a calculated and neat move; will we end up travelling alongside Lyra to the North again, who is Angela Gorman, and what events are occurring in the Levant? These places may be closer off than they first appear, and for those of us who continued on reading with the (still forthcoming) Book of Dust series there are some tantalising clues to be gathered! ( )

This is a spin off novella set in the world of the author's His Dark Materials series, between the end of the original trilogy and The Book of Dust. Lyra and her daemon Pantaleimon rescue a witch's daemon who claims to be seeking a cure for a sickness from which his mistress (but not he) suffers. But all is not as it seems. The story is brief, but quite dramatic, and as for Once Upon a Time in the North, the book also includes some snippets of interesting and amusing documents from Lyra's world). The book is also slightly annoyingly padded out with material from other related works taking up around a third of its length. ( )