Sabriel

Sabriel, The YA Protagonist All Others Hope to Be, Aka, the perfect mixture of personality traits and a decent level of competency while not being arrogant.
Sabriel is neither helpless nor too powerful or competent at saving the world, thinks clearly, doesn't do stupid things, and is, for the most part, an example of all the right things a person should say or do(and maybe this takes away from the book, removing a lot of character development in Sabriel from the book)
Not only does Sabriel not fall into the common faults I find in most recent YA heroines, but Sabriel the book avoids such flaws I find in most recent YA books as well (and not saying that I don't enjoy such books with some of these faults on occasion, but never in too high a concentration, please).Garth Nix, as with the Keys to the Kingdom series, which I read some time ago, creates a interesting world that is the perfect mixture of unique, fresh ideas and well-worn, trite fantasy.
The world isn't huge, isn't full of too much lore (or rather it isn't explored), but there is more than enough world building for a YA book.

And why has Sabriel lost a star?
Because its a bit boring sometimes.
Sabriel just felt..a little dull.I never wanted to do nothing else but finished the story; I wasn't enthralled in the book because I felt like I knew how it would go, knew how it would play out. It felt like I'd already read Sabriel. Everyone felt too good. It feels odd to say that this book felt dull. In only one book a schoolgirl has defeated a evil that has plagued the land of The Old Kingdom for 200 years.It just felt like a puppeteer was running the show and had planned out events from the start.
So... Sabriel goes here, kills this, escapes.
Goes here, does this, continues.
Stops, turns around, kills this.
Sabriel kills great evil. The End.
Not only that it felt too easy. That's it? That's all it takes. This is how I felt at the end of The Final Empire in many ways (although it was a longer book with more THINGS in it, so not so much). But then Sanderson reveals that it was not, indeed, as simple as that. Lets see what Lirael and a new PoV protagonist does to the series.

disclaimer: I listened to the audio book version narrated by Tim Curry.

I've heard great things about this book, but could never get into it. Finally decided to give the audio book a chance.

The beginning caught my attention. Then it was a long slow march to the 50% mark. It takes awhile to understand what's happening. Most of the time I had to go back a few pages. Tim Curry kept me going.

I feel like this would be a great book to reread. It's hard to get into at first, because of the language, but I think I'd like to reread it at some point.

It's interesting to wonder how this book would be received if it had been published in today's YA market instead of 25 years ago. (25 years!!) Some clues lie in the reprint covers with the large charter symbols that give it a more Hunger Games or Divergent feel to it. Would it get an updated title like “A Path of Bells and Spirits” or I even wonder if it would be a multiple POV book split between Sabriel and Touchstone? I even wonder if an editor today would encourage Nix to put more emphasis on the alternate history facet of the books.

I loved these books as a tween/teen and still do. I think they hold up well despite being a bit of a hard sell for kids. The old covers - though I love them and think they are beautiful - are VERY different from the kind of YA covers you see today and the new ones look like generic fantasy.

Anyway, it's fun to think about. I still feel strong emotions towards these books. I think I still want to be Sabriel and Lirael when I grow up. (I wrote about them a few years ago for WWAC if you want more emotions: https://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2015/09/books-shaped-sabriel/)

I reread this now because I wanted something comforting and I wanted someone saying to me, “This is all hard and I'm scared and unprepared. But you can do it.” Sabriel does that for me.

Finally, if you haven't listened to the audiobook versions, I HIGHLY recommend them. They're read by Tim Curry and you haven't lived until you've heard him voice Mogget, an extremely bitchy cat.

2 stars to the story, 4 stars to the audio book narration.

I just couldn't get into the story and nothing really happened? Everything seemed long and dragged out and although it did pick up a bit close to the end, I was still bored all the way through. The world is quite interesting though so I'm conflicted over whether or not to continue the series.

If I were asked to describe this book in one word, it would be this: boring. If I were given three more, they would be: confusing world building.

The story starts off with the titular Sabriel's birth. While there are few openings I like less than that for fantasy books, I will admit that it gave information that would have been difficult at best - and distracting at worst - to fit in otherwise. So, I overlooked that.

Then comes the first chapter and we were off to a rolling start. We're first introduced to a newly adult Sabriel when she resurrects a dead bunny for a younger classmate and is viewed with a nice bit of superstitious fear. Next she's off dealing with a Death servant that has broken into the College and is currently causing the underclassmen to scream. Brilliant start. However, that's all the first chapter and things start to go downhill very quickly from there.

Honestly, I should have known better. This book has a map in the front of it. Fine, right? I mean, most fantasy books do and I love flipping back to the map to check the location of places. However, in this case, sixty miles is less than an inch. That means this fairly small map covers a huge amount of land. And, of course, like all good fantasy books, they put that landscape to use.

So, Sabriel sets off on her epic journey. I hate epic journeys. I much prefer mundane ones, but I kind of hate all journeys in fantasy books. To make this one worse, she's going it solo. That's not to say I hate Sabriel. Au contraire, she was too flat for me to feel anything for. I did think it was nice however, to see a male author handle a female character as a character first and a female second. In fact, her being a woman/girl seemed irrelevant to most everything about this book. For this, I give Garth Nix a big thumbs up. He did well. However, for me, Sabriel is way too serious. She's almost a stuffed shirt and with no quirks that endear her to me.

The world-building truly confuses me. Fairly early in the story (chapter two, I think) we are given our first glimpse of a world that isn't typical to fantasy. There's this wall that sounds like something right out of World War II. The soldiers that guard it carry machine guns but wear chain mail. They also know that swords, pikes and maces are more dangerous to the things they guard against, so they carry those too. There was a time I would have ignored a fantasy book simply because of this, but I've been looking for stories that blend technology and magic lately.

This seemed like a good choice. Right up until they mentioned trucks. Then, before two pages were out, came the mention of a rubber duck then a football field. I did a little research. Assuming that the tech in this world was apace of ours, it would have to be around nineteen-forty at the earliest. Probably a bit later, allowing for the rubber duck to become popular enough that a schoolgirl had heard of it and, with the assumption that she had actually used one, probably around nineteen-sixty.

So, I'll assume that the world would have other tech that is equivalent to that era. Of course, this is only an assumption, because bandying anachronistic words around doesn't equal ‘world-building'. In this regard, this book reminds me of the awful ‘All the Paths of Shadows' that did much the same thing. (Of course, at least Sabriel doesn't hate being a woman the same way that main female did.) Later, there was mention of flying machines that sounded like German work during the 1920's and 30's.

Now let's talk about the wall, built to keep the Dead out and the humans in - that succeeds better on the latter than the former - and divides the Old Kingdom from Ancelstierre. First of all, from all sounds, the wall has been up for many, many years. Maybe a few hundred, in fact. It makes me wonder, if this old work is still the best for the job, if technology and advancement stopped...well, advancing. Stagnating, like most other fantasy worlds do.

The Old Kingdom is an unpleasant place. Our first true glimpse of it is in Ancelstierre's autumn but the Old Kingdom's full-blown, freezing winter. Yep, just three feet and you go from moderately nice, sunny weather to dusk with a freezing wind. It was never explained why, but I was willing to take it on faith that the magic in the wall kept back the evil magic of the Dead in the Old Kingdom that influences the weather somehow. And there were many Dead in the Old Kingdom. However, it was also early afternoon in Ancelstiere, but almost dusk in the Old Kingdom. Why? Does the wall bend time or does the magic?

We get this little tidbit from Sabriel on the Old Kingdom:
'[...]She felt a pang of sympathy for the poor people the Dead had enslaved. Many would probably freeze to death, or die of exhaustion, only to be brought back as dull-witted Hands. Only those who went over the waterfall would escape that fate. Truly, the Old Kingdom was a terrible place, when even death did not mean an end to slavery and despair.'

Oh ho. Time for me to flip back to that map and...just as I suspected; the Old Kingdom has many towns and roads. In fact, Sabriel herself was born there, to a band of travelers, as we discover in the prologue. However, this is where my problem really starts.

If the conditions are as bad as they appear, (and I think being forced into slavery for all eternity is pretty bad) why the hell is there still people living there? I know, you don't want to leave your house, but if the alternative is eternal slavery, (and, for the record, I don't think slaves are allowed to live at home) why would you choose to stay in that place?

The king/queen/regent at some point should have looked at all the people - their people! - that were dying and decided it was too high of a price to pay. They should have begged Ancelstierre or any other kingdom in the world, to take their people in. Tell them that you'll work to become citizens.

Also, apparently you need papers to travel into the Old Kingdom - which is also treated as a tourist attraction - (the hell?) because you don't want the Dead traveling into our country. (Although I don't know how restricting who can enter the Old Kingdom actually solves that.) Anyway, what I'm getting at is thus: with all this ‘Charter magic' (coughsymbol magiccoughsound magiccough) at your disposal, surely some of your practitioners would be able to tell if the person is living or Dead. Or hosting a Dead - or whatever the people are so afraid is coming through. (Yes, in fact touching the forehead of one marked by charter magic - which, from what I gathered is something like a worldwide baptism, actually tells you if the person is fully human. Of course, I think the person toughing the other would have to be a charter mage, but it's not like there's only one in the whole world.) They could have evacuated the whole Old Kingdom and treated the citizens as refugees.

Instead they essentially boarded up a country for having a non-contagious disease.

I did like the idea of necromancers in this story, as they have to walk the river of death to get the dead back. There's also gates - though I didn't fully understand that. It seems as though once you pass a certain gate, you are well and truly dead, in that no living person can walk there to get you. If, however, there's a Dead with you that is strong enough, you can still be brought back to a false life. Adding to the confusion, at least one Dead held on near an early gate tenaciously enough to pull himself back. And I won't even get into how confusing the ‘resurrection' scene was.

I know this book is one of the ‘independent-female/young adult fantasy' books to read, but it just wasn't for me.

(Originally posted on my blog: http://pagesofstarlight.blogspot.com/)

This is my second time reading Sabriel and honestly, I had to do it because I remember loving it and not much else. The beginning I had, the way Sabriel and Touchstone meet and that's about it. So one day at work I decided to listen to the audiobook and that was that.

Sabriel is a girl sent to a boarding school for girls. And she doesn't hate it! Hear me out, she is actually having a pretty good time living there and it's not about her being horribly mistreated. So why is she there? Because her dad is in an other country, one that is medieval and magical as opposed to the “real” world that already has black and white movies and tanks and such. Said dad is also the person tasked with making the creatures coming back from Death go back and leave the living alone.
Then one day his tools (a sword and a set of magical bells) get delivered to Sabriel, who needs to go to that other country to find her dad and to save the world, as it is inevitable. She is joined by a chaotic magical creature in the shape of a talking cat and a young man who was turned into a statue 200 years ago.

Generally I'm not too much into books about teenage girls. I was one at one point and I much prefer both my child and adult life, so that already is kind of difficult. Sabriel is cool though. She is fairly serious, not very emotional, she is special without being an invincible perfect little angel and very very important to me, she doesn't need to put others down to be cool. Often times I feel YA authors fall into the same mistake teenage girls do as well; having to compare the girl to everyone else to make her seem awesome, instead of doing well because it's in her and that's what she does for herself. It's either other girls or the men and boys around her, but someone needs to be the enemy who is the root of all her problems, because god help us, she is just naturally perfect otherwise. Sabriel is an integral part of her word, though instead of being above everyone.
She is also not defined by being a girl mistreated by men. Another issue I often have. We can have many interesting things going on with a female character other than going the cliche, cheap way of “men hate her, therefore she is suffering”. Okay? Show something new. Another point for this book, Sabriel does many things and she is regarded as a person and not Princess Oppressed.

The way it's written makes me feel like this book is much older and stands apart from its own genre in the best way possible. The ideas are great, the magic is fascinating. There is plenty of action and even a twist here or there, but the book itself stays actually very well-written. The prose is the kind I like, not too emotional and really fits the mood of the whole story.

The only thing I don't like that much is the end. After facing off the Big Bad of the book we get no explanations and no way to know how the characters are going to be after it. It was just sudden, which is especially sad because the protagonist of the second book is NOT Sabriel, but a whole new girl. This is not enough to make me rate the book any worse than I already did, but that's something you need to know. It's about the journey and the destination is just... functional. You don't get big emotional moments at the end, you just hope shit went as well as you want it to be for these people. (They get mentioned in book 2, so we get that, but t the same time you have to fill in between those points.)

I do recommend.

This is a book I previously read when I was much younger (can't recall exactly how young). I picked it up again because I remembered that I had enjoyed the series immensely, but that was literally all I could remember about it. That, and that it had ‘something to do with death'.

My younger self would probably have rated this 5/5. I have rated it only 4. The quality of the book has obviously not changed, but it was originally intended for those in their very early teens. Which I no longer am, by at least a decade.

This story is based around Sabriel, whose father is (the) Abhorsen. He is essentially a necromancer, except he puts dead things back ‘into death' rather than raising them from the dead. (No wonder I remembered this book had something to do with death, it's all based on death!)

When Sabriel was very young her father sent her to live at a boarding school in Ancelstierre, outside the Old Kingdom. Ancelstierre remained relatively unaffected by what was happening in the Old Kingdom while she was growing up, namely that the dead weren't staying dead. However in her last year of school Abhorsen goes missing, and she has to venture back into the Old Kingdom to locate him, and as she undergoes her journey she discovers more about herself, her heritage, and just how bad things are in the Old Kingdom.

Overall it is a wonderful, and highly imaginative story. The world that Garth Nix wrote about is intriguing and I loved reading about it. The creatures and the characters he created are unique, particularly Mogget and Touchstone.

However, there are certain points that I didn't enjoy as much.

1. Sabriel has very little knowledge of how to deal with the dead or about the roles of the Abhorsen and yet she defeats everything she comes up against, including essentially the ultimate bad dead guy of the bad dead guys in the Old Kingdom. But this is something you see often in YA/Fantasy novels so I'm not that bothered.

2. A lot of how the magic works in the world of the Old Kingdom is a little vague in my opinion, particularly the ‘free magic'.

3. At times the plot felt like it just draaaaaaaagged along.

In conclusion: I enjoyed it (mostly), I'll probably at least consider re-reading the rest of the series, but it's just not quite as great as I remembered it being.

I would recommend it for fans of young adult and fantasy novels. If you like things like His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman you'll probably like this (he was even a reviewer for it – look at the bottom of the cover).

Baaah! Teenage pulp!

As far as I can tell, the only time I had any fun while reading this book, were the rare moments when Nix managed to knock a good joke into the narrative when I least expected him to.

I'm at a loss to explain the popularity of this book. Most everything I've read this year has been leagues better than this... tale. The lead character is, at best, boring. And there are only two other characters (noteworthy) in the story - yeah, a grand total of three main characters. The cat was interesting for a while, but then it was made obvious that his story wouldn't be told in this book, and he / it became a decoration, for the most part. The third guy is the obligatory romantic interest for our just-out-of-school heroine - another flat and uninteresting character whose story never really gets explored.

And then there's the weird, and frankly senseless magic system. Charter magic which... er... comes from these huge stones (??? never really explained) and is somehow seen as wriggling glyphs once they're in place. Oh, and ringing bells, and whistling that controls another form of magic (??? again, never explained) Or are they both the same thing? I wondered at one point why, if the basis of their magic system was that elementary, more people in the story didn't know it (at least a little). Sabriel's world has the most quixotic magic system I've encountered in (my short-term) memory.

In other words, skip this one, go re-read Harry Potter. Or delve into Bartimaeus's tales. Heck, even Percy Jackson and his merry band of demigods is a better bet.

One of my favorite book series. I love the characters and the world of these books and enjoy re-reading them every few years.

A solid read but really failed to blow me away. Having heard a number of positive reviews, I expected more from Mr. Nix. It wasn't as fast-paced as I would have hoped and the pacing seemed inconsistent. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to someone looking for a good stand-alone fantasy/paranormal read.

I first read this book when I was a kid, and truly, it made me develop an irrational fear of zombies for the rest of my life. Talk about formative.

I realize, as an adult, that this book isn't very scary - and while I try to re-read it every few years to see if it still holds the #1 spot in my heart, it's been a little while since my last re-read. So, this is my review of reading this book as an 11 year old, from 20-some years in the future. (Maybe I'll re-read it again soon and then delete this review in shame, but I doubt it).

The thing that continues to stand out in my memory is the pacing. The pacing made me feel like I was running for my life and it seemed like there was no room to even breathe. The consequences of inaction waited at every turn, and the tension and the sense of impending doom were oppressive. I have never been able to exactly recapture this feeling since. I was and am a relatively slow reader, but this was one of those books that I managed to read in one day (next-day-me, who had to wake up early for school, was not super pleased).

The second big thing for me was that this was my gateway read into fantasy. The concept of the charter magic system, which includes both necromancy and - er, reverse necromancy? I know that just sounds like killing people - were so new to me. I couldn't believe how much the author had packed into one book - charter magic, multiple set pieces, traveling between two different countries/kingdoms. I know this is all pretty standard fare in the genre, but I didn't know that at the time. Plus, the added splash of horror was so incredibly welcome to a kid that couldn't get enough ghost stories. I kept having to peek out my window to make sure there wasn't a dead thing creeping up on me.

The last big thing for me was the cover. I know you aren't supposed to judge a book by its cover, but the original artwork by Leo and Diane Dillon, while less text accurate in what the main character looks like, was perfect and (for me) actually added more depth to the story. The solemn expression, the almost plain, almost austere design of the character - this was a new type of female character for me. I don't know how to exactly articulate this, but Sabriel was a girl who didn't know what she was doing but she was still...serious, competent, thoughtful, rational, heroic, smart, and surprisingly fearless despite being (rightly) terrified (and then grieving). I thought she was the coolest person ever.

So I guess it wasn't just the cover - it was the main character too. All of the characters were likable to me, but Sabriel is a character that I think I'll treasure for the rest of my life.