Book Review: The Rose Field by Philip Pullman (The Book of Dust #3)

 

Not excited for this one, but I wanted to at least finish the trilogy. Spoilers ahead.

Lyra is still looking for her daemon, Pantalaimon. Further east, she hopes to find the mysterious red building which might give her the answers she's looking for.

Okay, not gonna lie, I just overall did not enjoy this trilogy. And this third book, while not terrible, was no exception. I just found this trilogy to largely be a boring slog.

Everything I loved about this world and these characters in His Dark Materials has just been sucked away to make place for this drab, depressing and dark world and it's just not a direction I appreciated the series going in. I get that the author probably wanted to "age up" the series alongside its now-mature target audience from when HDM was first published, but it didn't work for me. Yes, HDM could also get very dark and brutal, but it never felt this devoid of joy and hope as this miserable trilogy is. Just because the trilogy is darker now, that doesn't make it better.

I also hate how this trilogy retcons and breaks a ton of rules from HDM. For example, in HDM, touching another person's daemon is basically the worst thing one can do. Yet in this book people are just touching each other's daemons willy-nilly like it's no big deal, at most something slightly uncomfortable. In HDM, daemons rarely speak to anyone who isn't their person. In this book, they talk to others regularly. In HDM, people (with the exception of witches) can barely ever separate from their daemons. Here, there's quite a few people who can just do it and it's not even seen as that big a deal anymore. All of this makes it feel like this trilogy cares very little by what was established in the prior series.

So yeah, I didn't care for this one. I guess it isn't terrible and some people might enjoy it, but for me it was a boring slog to get through. I did enjoy Ionides to an extent and it was nice to see Lyra and Pan reunite again, and I liked the griffins okay, but overall this trilogy just really wasn't my cup of tea.

Rating: 2/5