In case you're wondering, I read many trilogies and series'. Bartimaeus Trilogy, Inheritance Trilogy, Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, (every) Harry Potter, Series of Unfortunate Events (1-12), Peter and the Starcatchers (1/2)... and now I've finished 'His Dark Materials', 1-3.
It's a good fantasy trilogy, but it really forces down the readers' throat that God and religion are evil and should be fought to the death.
Yeeeaaah, not a good message. Even if you aren't religious, it's obvious how you're supposed to think about religion by the books' end.
Scary block of text, eh? Well, it's my description of each book, starting with the first.
First book!
The first and second books are mild, with the girl 'Lyra' being given an Alethiometer through which she can learn anything she wants by simply turning the handles and reading the symbols. It features her-- oh, I should mention, SPOILERS!-- fighting a rogue branch of 'the church', the "oblation board", or better known to the children as the evil 'Gobblers', who kidnap children and take they're "daemon"s; every persons' lifelong companion, or as it's found out later, they're soul, which can change form at will and must stay close to their person, and tear them apart from the children. They did this because of the trilogy-long obsession with 'Dust', a strange, counscious matter that is compelled to adults. The church is obsessed with it, and the oblation board experiments to discover more about it. As it turns out, Dust was 'Original Sin', when Adam and Eve took a bit of the forbidden fruit. SOOOOOOO, Lyra's father, Lord Asreil, created an enormous entrance to another, parallel world at the end of the first book, and Lyra and her daemon, Pantaliamon, enter it. There the book ends, the the second begins!
Second book!
In the second book, Lyra explores a world where there are adult-attacking specters, who can't be killed and will suck the life force (later discovered to be the souls) of the adults, rendering them totally oblivious to everything, empty shells without souls. There she meets Will, a boy from OUR world who has all his life been on the run from the authorities, trying to lie low. His mother is... special. She can't do much on her own, and he takes care of her. He didn't know much about his father, aside from that he was an explorer who went missing, and never came back. He discovered a rip in space, a window of sorts, leading into the world with the specters. The town itself is deserted, and he stays in a little hotel, as does Lyra, and they discover eachother and stick together from then on. There are children there, and they're afraid of the Specters, but they can't see them and aren't affected. Him and Lyra EVENTUALLY discover a knife, a SUBTLE knife, which can tear the fabric of a world into another, allowing transportation between any instantly, in the position where it was torn. Blah blah the kids discover they have it and fight them for it, because it holds off the specters, blah blah they're saved, blah blah he lost two fingers fighting to get it, blah. blah. Anyway, I do know your time is valuable... The witches who save them (because they know Lyra and protect her) go into the forest and are overcome by specters, lead by Lyra's corrupt mother Marissa Coulter, who was the head of the Oblation Board, so Lyra didn't trust her. Sooo, Will discovers his father finally (skipping many a chapter of how he came to be there), who heals his fingers and turns on a light to see his son and realize it, just in time to be killed... by a witch... Then, Will comes back the the camp and finds every witch soul-less, and Lyra gone. There the book ends, and the third and final book begins!
Third book!
Lyra was being held captive by her mother in a quiet cave by a village, and Will comes to save her with some help from rogue Angels and tiny spies from Lord Asriel, who is leading the resistance against God- "The Authority". He accidentally breaks the knife because of losing his concentration, and he finds the armored bear-king Iorek- a long-time friend of Lyra's- who fixes it. Lyra and Will then decide to go into the land of the dead (remember, there's no Heaven and no Hell in the book, just emptiness and a 'prison camp'), where she could find her friend Roger, who she brought to his death unknowingly, and Will's father, whom he had never known. Lots of pain and suffering, accepting of death... she has to leave her daemon/soul behind, which was gut-wrenching for her, but she was hopeful that she could get him back. They come into this huge dim area where everyone dead is at, who are dull and bored after centuries of reruns of 'Frasier', and who are all depressed and Emo, and can only talk in a faint whisper. They find the people they wanted to see, and set off to make a rip into another world where they can release them into. They find out they'll dissolve if they go out into the air, but they elect to anyway. Lyra and Will, with the help of some ghost friends who kept themselves together, help Asriel fight against The Authority's (the term used to soften 'God's) armies, where they release "The Authority" from a little glass container, and he dissipates into nothing, and are reunited with their daemons, and since Will came from ooour world, he never met his, and they went into another world.
This is where the story gets pretty interesting. Well, by interesting I mean controversial.
Controversial parts!
They already killed God, now they have to have sex, right? Well... possibly. This whole time, over two books, they're obviously right for and attracted to eachother (they're 13 btw), and over two books it really builds up, until suddenly in that other world they conpulsively have a first kiss, and then it comes back to them laying asleep holding eachother. YOU DECIDE. It sounds very out of character for them to do more than hug, so I assumed it was just that. Although I admit it suspicious.
They come out of the woods hugging and kissing, saying they love eachother, all of that. And then, they discover their friends from Lyra's world are coming to take them home, and it's brought to their attention that anyone staying in another world for long gets sick and dies horribly fast, so they can't stay permanently in her world or his, and that using the knife to go from one world to another drains the world of Dust (discovered to be conscious thinking, intelligence, conscious life), and that every time they rip a hole a Spectre comes into being. Really ridiculous, if you ask me. Two books building up, and then the day after they actually admit their feelings, they can't ever be together again. EVER. They're messing with my emotions!!!11!!
It ends abruptly after that, with Lyra returning to her world and Will returning to his, each "loving eachother more than anyone has loved anything before." Haha, dramatic. Still... it spends more than half the series focusing on this will they won't they drama between the two, just to have them kiss, do it?, and never see eachother again.
Like I said, good fantasy series, just... dramatic, and very, very, un-subtle near the end.
And Congrats on actually reading four huge blocks of text. Better than the 1500 pages I read, but still, on the internet it's about equivelent for attention spans. 8)