Pros: It's rivetingly dark, but doesn't worship darkness.
Cons: The romance may be too neat and tidy.
The Bottom Line: A dangerous, volatile, contemptuous and endearing creature made out of inscrutable magic. Yeah, that's a great way to characterize a cat.
"I have walked in Death to the very precipice of the Ninth Gate."
Sabriel has lived most of her life in an Ancelstierre boarding school. Now she's graduating at the top of her class and preparing for university. But news of her father's death draws her north, through the Wall and into the Old Kingdom, where magic is real and perilous. After all, if your father dies, what choice do you have but to go into death and try to bring him back out with you?
Sabriel
Garth Nix, 1995
In the Old Kingdom magic is governed by the Charter, and Free Magic, especially necromancy, is a temptation for the unscrupulous and power-hungry. Sabriel's father, Abhorsen, is unique in that he practices necromancy within the Charter. His purpose is not to raise the dead, but to bind them in death so they cannot trouble the living.
Now he himself is bound, and his sword and his bandolier of magical bells, which can wake the dead or put them to sleep, have fallen to Sabriel. Unfortunately, because she was raised in Ancelstierre she knows little of the Old Kingdom, barely enough to defend herself from the demons she soon faces. Her fear is palpable, her courage even more admirable considering her lack of confidence.
Sabriel is a great protagonist, both young and grim. She can take charge and save a village from undead monsters, but she's only just coming out of the awkward self-consciousness of adolescence and must confront her father's death and her own adulthood. She's joined by Touchstone, an enigmatic young man who's been frozen in death for two hundred years. As a character he's serviceable, but not as interesting in execution as in concept. Much more successful is Mogget, Abhorsen's feline familiar who has advice for Sabriel, but also a lot of scorn. His sardonic attitude is wonderfully catlike as he cozies up to her even while mocking. He's more than he appears, and proves to be a danger in addition to an ally.
Nix's Old Kingdom is well-realized and feels substantial even though we only see small pieces of it. Ancelstierre evokes a World War I era England, though the Wall looms large, rendering telephones, machine guns, and automobiles ineffectual in its presence. The third setting, death, is most remarkable. Linked by a series of nine gates and dominated by the river that flows through them, death is a place of constant tension as malevolent spirits seek to return to life through the aid of foolish necromancers. Sabriel combats the dead, binding them beyond each gate in turn, while trying not to be swept beyond the ninth gate herself. Meanwhile, frost rims her comatose body, which her friends must defend from ghoulishly re-embodied spirits.
The mood is thoroughly dark and sometimes bloody. While this will appeal to some, others might balk at the prospect of evil spirits and necromancy. I hope they give this book a chance, because while Sabriel features darkness, it does not love it. Good and evil are shown here with the clarity that our culture has stupidly confined to the fantasy genre. Sabriel's struggle is noble on a personal and a societal level, and her story can only influence its reader to good. But most importantly it's a great read, and easily one of the better young adult novels in the genre.
Sabriel works as a standalone novel, though Nix has written two sequels, Lirael and Abhorsen.
Addendum:
In the post-Potter era it is inevitable that Sabriel, with its opening scenes at a boarding school where magic is taught, will be compared to the bestselling boy-wonder (http://www.epinions.com/content_117638532740), despite the books being different in every other aspect. Speaking qualitatively, Harry Potter is like a Saint Bernard. Frisky and fun at first, it grows into something much stronger and weightier by the end of the series. Sabriel is more like a leopard. It is sleek and exotic and from the start you fear to take your eyes off it.
A more fruitful comparison can be made with Neal Shusterman's Everlost (http://www.epinions.com/content_368624963204), a less conventional story in which the protagonists are young teens who die and experience a ghost world. Where Sabriel is tense and dark, Everlost is often humorous. Everlost is the better book, multi-dimensional and sometimes startling. But it may be that the world of Sabriel will stay with me longer.
Nix s spellbinding Abhosen Trilogy takes readers on a brilliant voyage into a land of dark secrets, stupendous magic, and unimaginable danger. These c...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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