The Abhorsen Trilogy Box Set
 | Average Customer Rating: Recommend To preserve life,the Abhorsen must enter Death Product details and pricing info |
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26 Customer Reviews Posted
- True Fantasy!!
- How can one describe these books?? They are some of the greatest fantasy I have ever seen (and I read a lot!). The scenes of Death...in the Old Kingdom...especially the characters of Mogget and the Disreputable Dog in _Lirael_ and _Abhorsen_ are all fantastic and imaginative. Words cannot describe it.
For what it's worth, I love these so much I can list all of the Necromantic Bells. - 2006-08-29, 0 of 2 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Lovely and strong
- This trilogy is satisfying and surprising in the strength of its female characters while never losing sight of a good story. Fantasy at its finest...you get parallel worlds, magic, mundanity, and misunderstanding, but not to comic effect, rather to catastrophic endings.
What is really lovely about reading this series, other than the fine prose, is the ambivalence that each character encounters and doesn't quite overcome...in other words, it is a fine telling of the difficulties that we all have in the negotiation of adolescence to adulthood. This series is never condescending and truly pays attention to the intelligence that all of us carry. - 2006-07-02, 5 of 5 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- I love these books...
- Each one of these books are great, whether you are a young adult or an adult reader. Once you read the first one, you'll want to go straight to the next one. These books pacakaged together are a really good value.
- 2006-02-26, 0 of 1 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Death is a river
- For those of you who feel that dragons, unicorns, and bards are a bit overdone nowadays, this fantasy trilogy offers up a heroine who binds the dead with a bandolier of bells. The Geography of Death is lovingly delineated, from the prologue where Sabriel is born and dies and is rescued from the First Gate of Death by her father, to the third book in the trilogy, where the new Abhorsen braves Death in the form of a river, a waterfall, pools of black water, strange currents that suck the spirit from the flesh.
Sabriel herself is an English schoolgirl, recently graduated from Wyverley Academy with a "first in English, equal first in Music, third in Mathematics, seventh in Science, second in Fighting Arts and fourth in Etiquette. She had also been a runaway first in Magic..." A visitation from the Dead sends Sabriel on a quest through the magical Old Kingdom, in order to reunite her father's body with his spirit which is trapped within the Fourth Gate of Death. She has to do battle with a really nasty necromancer-Adept, and rescue a prince who is a bit of a figurehead at first but who finally develops into a memorable character in his own right.
Sabriel is both helped and hindered by a very non-cuddly cat named Mogget.
"Lirael" is the middle book this remarkable fantasy series. If I ever die and go to fantasy heaven, I hope it resembles Nix's immense library beneath glacier and mountain, where each door opens into a separate mystery. In the catacombs beneath the library, Lirael discovers how to turn herself into an ice otter or a barking owl, reads "The Book of Remembrance and Forgetting", and duels with the monstrous Stilken.
However, "Lirael" isn't just about Lirael. Prince Sameth, heir apparent to Sabriel as the Old Kingdom's champion against evil necromancers, also comes of age in this volume. There are plenty of evil necromancers to go around. In fact, at the end of this book, it appears as though they are winning the war to turn the Old Kingdom into a kingdom of the dead.
"Abhorsen" is a direct continuation of "Lirael," with the ex-assistant librarian and her companion, Prince Sameth carrying on the battle against Hedge and the evil he is digging up at Red Lake. Although Prince Sameth was meant to be the Abhorsen-in-Waiting, heir to the powers of 'The Book of the Dead' and the seven bells, Lirael now takes up that role, and Sam seeks his destiny as a descendant of the mysterious Wallmakers, who built the barrier between the magical Old Kingdom and the mundane kingdom of Ancelstierre. The two will need all of the magic they can conjure up against an enemy that threatens not only the Charter, but all living beings.
The swirl and cross-currents of life gradually ebb as the dead pass through gate after gate on Garth Nix's nameless river--a river like Styx or Lethe that runs through each of our subconscious underworlds as a legacy of our water-bound gestation. It is an eerie experience to remember that journey of birth--only this time in the wake of the dead--in this marvelous fantasy trilogy. - 2006-01-30, 17 of 17 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Good story
- If only there where more books like this then I would read more. Easy to read you can go through the entire series in about four days and then be ready to read it all again.
- 2006-01-03, 1 of 2 people found this review helpful, Rated:
