Sabriel by Garth Nix Release Date: Buy it Today Eos Ratings Action Romance Characters Overall Purchase on Amazon. Purchase at Powell’s. Find independent bookstores.

In order to keep her safe from the random power of Free Magic and the Dead–zombie-like creatures that roam the kingdom–Sabriel’s father sends her to boarding school across the wall, where only a few even believe magic exists. But when her father’s presumed dead, Sabriel must journey back home and put everything her father taught her into practice against the Dead, which are being controlled by some much greater being.

An angry spirit in the body of a cat will teach her what she needs to know, and she will be accompanied by a young man who has been frozen by magic for the last two hundred years. The three of them must find her father and defeat the powerful dead creature who has been destroying the Old Kingdom.

Wow. It’s been a while since a fantasy book really hit me like this. Just the sheer world building that seemed so complex yet so simple at the same time. There was a great deal of back story and the world was its own place, yet I never really felt like it was info dumping nor did I get confused. The characters were compelling and the plot interesting, and the magic felt unique.

Sabriel was a great character, her journey felt like a realistic one, her questions of her destiny weren’t forced, but true. She grew up in a world like ours, yet she grew up on the border between it and the wall that guards it from the Old Kingdom, so even those around her knew that magic was real and not something to be relegated to bedtime stories.

It seems like the more books I read, the more I realize that what seemed unique in one book is really an old storytelling technique. In this case, it’s the idea of a wall that separates "our" world (or one like ours) from a magical world. Sometimes it’s a physical wall, like in this book and in Stardust by Neil Gaiman, and many other times it’s some kind of a veil or parallel world issue. I think as humans we just desire to believe that something else is out there, and since we’ve explored most places on our planet, we begin to look at the magical world as something that must have been walled off or divided from ours somehow. Sabriel had a nice usage of this, and I liked how enough magic seeped through in the areas around the wall that that magic still worked there.

One thing I never quite understood was the charter marks and that form of magic. Sabriel’s necromancy made sense, and the charter magic never really bothered me or distracted me from my enjoyment, but I do wish I understood better what it was/how it worked. But I’m just one of those people who likes to dissect everything, even if it wasn’t meant to be dissected.

Ratings Reasons:
Action 4 - There were a few spots that slowed it down, one set of pages where I put it down and took a few days to pick it back up, but over all it had a lot of swashbuckling magical adventure and moved at a good pace.

Romance 3 1/2 - I didn’t care a ton about the romance or the main couple, but I also wanted them to get together and knew that they would. It’s not a romance book, but I did appreciate the romance that was there.

Characters 4 -Very enjoyable characters who stuck with me after reading.

Overall 4 - Read it. You know you want to. For all of you fantasy adventure fans out there, I highly recommend it.

Extras:
There are two more books in this world, and another story appears in a collection of short stories. The next two books seem to be about a different character and just have Sabriel and Touchstone as side characters. I plan to read them soon, but this book was just too good for me to want to jump into the next one. Had to let this one sit and seep in for a while.

There is also a very informative site setup with more background information into the books - http://www.abhorsentrilogy.com/abhorsen.html

Parents: 13+ I’m thinking the slightly older reader would enjoy this more. There are vague thoughts of sex and quite a bit of destroying of the Dead, but mostly it’s just that the writing and the story are a bit more on the complex and mature side.

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