BUTTERFLY TATTOO

With The Golden Compass Philip Pullman garnered every accolade under the sun. Critics lobbed around such superlatives as "elegant," "awe-inspiring," "grand," and "glittering," and used "magnificent" with gay abandon. Each reader had a favorite chapter--or, more likely, several--from the opening tour de force to Lyra's close call at Bolvangar to the great armored-bear battle. And Pullman was no less profligate when it came to intellectual firepower or singular characters. The dThe Subtle Knife offers everything we could have wished for, and more. For a start, there's a young hero--from our world--who is a match for Lyra Silvertongue and whose destiny is every bit as shattering. Like Lyra, Will Parry has spent his childhood playing games. Unlike hers, though, his have been deadly serious. This 12-year-old long ago learned the art of invisibility: if he could erase himself, no one would discover his mother's increasing instability and separate them.As the novel opens, Will's enemies will do anything for information about his missing father, a soldier and Arctic explorer who has been very much airbrushed from the official picture. Now Will must get his mother into safe seclusion and make his way toward Oxford, which may hold the key to John Parry's disappearance. But en route and on the lam from both the police and his family's tormentors, he comes upon a cat with more than a mouse on her mind: "She reached out a paw to pat something in the air in front of her, something quite invisible to Will." What seems to him a patch of everyday Oxford conceals far more: "The cat stepped forward and vanished." Will, too, scrambles through and into another oddly deserted landscape--one in which children rule and adults (and felines) are very much at risk. Here in this deathly silent city by the sea, he will soon have a dustup with a fierce, flinty little girl: "Her expression was a mixture of the very young--when she first tasted the cola--and a kind of deep, sad wariness." Soon Will and Lyra (and, of course, her dAs Pullman moves between his young warriors and the witch Serafina Pekkala, the magnetic, ever-manipulative Mrs. Coulter, and Lee Scoresby and his hare dThroughout, Pullman is in absolute control of his several worlds, his plot and pace equal to his inspiration. Any number of astonishing scenes--small- and large-scale--will have readers on edge, and many are cause for tears. "You think things have to be possible," Will demands. "Things have to be true!" It is Philip Pullman's gift to turn what quotidian minds would term the impossible into a reality that is both heartbreaking and beautiful. --Kerry Fried

Extrait L'ATELIER DE LALCHAND L'atelier de Lalchand : établis, produits chimiques, fusées, etc. Une fillette débraillée et sale, Lila, entre en scène. Elle ajoute délicatement une pincée de poudre à la fusée, puis elle réfléchit, et en ajoute encore un peu. Finalement, elle se dit : «Pourquoi pas ?» et elle en verse une grande quantité. Elle recule et allume la mèche. Elle va se cacher en coulisse. Un homme, Lalchand, fabricant de feux d'artifice, entre dans l'atelier. Il observe la mèche, puis il marche dessus pour l'éteindre. Lalchand Lila ! Lila réapparaît. Lalchand C'est quoi, ça ? Lila Une expérience rudimentaire, père. Lalchand grogne. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Ce n'était pas une vie ordinaire pour une jeune fille de onze ans: Lyra vivait, en compagnie de son daemon Pantalaimon, parmi les Érudits de Jordan Collège, passant ses journées à courir dans les rues d'Oxford à la recherche éperdue d'aventures. Mais sa vie bascule le jour où elle entend parler d'une extraordinaire particule. D'une taille microscopique, la Poussière que l'on trouve uniquement dans les vastes étendues glacées des Royaumes du Nord - est censée posséder le pouvoir de briser les frontières entre les mondes, un pouvoir qui suscite effroi et convoitises... Jetée au coeur d'un terrible conflit, Lyra sera forcée d'accorder sa confiance aux gitans et à de terribles ours en armure. Et, lors de son périlleux voyage vers le Nord, elle devra découvrir pourquoi son propre destin semble étroitement lié à cette bataille sans merci où s'opposent des forces que nul ne l'avait préparée à affronter.

PW commented that the author "deftly interweaves strong themes" in this "moving" tale of a half-black teenager growing up in rural north Wales. Ages 12-up. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.