Rory's mention of Phillip Pullman's wonderful His Dark Materials trilogy a few months ago reminded me that I really had to go ahead and finish the damn thing. I just did.

I can't say that the third book, The Amber Spyglass completely fulfills the promise of the first, or, rather, that it could possibly achieve the imaginative splendor of The Golden Compass (called Northern Lights, I believe, in the rest of the English-reading world) or the bracingly tragic vision of the second book, The Subtle Knife; it's less riveting, less tightly wound and breath-stopping; and a whiff of didactic stuff about learning to be good starts to creep in toward the end. But to make too much of these shortcomings' to make such distinctions is cavilling. It's got all the Blakean/Miltonic themes set forth in the first one, coming back in unexpected and complicated ways. It's got angels, which are not as nifty a conception as the daemons introduced in the first volume, but which come pretty close. It's got lots of zeppelins (all books need more zeppelins, except possibly The Great Gatsby). And it manages to finesse a more or less happy ending without quite spoiling the essentially tough view of life that Pullman takes with his characters, which allows -- unlike the more programmatic heroic feats J.K. Rowling apportions to her destined-to-conquer hero -- one to accept without flinching those rewards and accolades which Lyra and Will receive at the story's end.

Any fantasy story (or, as Rory would have it, parallel-worlds SF tale) which invokes Keats' negative capability as a quality its young heroine must learn is going to have a long life on my bookshelf.