The Bookhive List: 'His Dark Materials' by Philip Pullman

The His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman is often classified as YA, but I didn't read it until adulthood, and I remember thinking that any teenager who read it would certainly grow up to be an incredibly emotionally mature adult. Fantasy is not everyone's cup of tea, myself included, but in the case of His Dark Materials, the fictional universe is very elaborately built up to provide a scaffolding upon which Pullman then dismantles the world in which we live -- and he pulls it off so gracefully. There are two points in the trilogy that stick out to me in particular as being the absolute most I have ever cried while reading a book, and this was more than just a few tears -- I finished the series in sobs; it is also one of my favorite love stories.

The series is often compared to The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, and there are many obvious similarities, including the use of fantasy elements as a kind of stand-in for Christianity. If you found the morality of Narnia to be too simplistic and prefer your religious allegories with heaping doses of cynicism and darkness, then His Dark Materials is more the series for you. The Catholic Church is deeply critical of the series, in part because the characters set out to destroy God; the fact that the human soul exists outside the body in the form of a small animal companion does not help. It is very difficult to read the novels and then accept that you will never have a little "daemon" otter or goldfinch following you wherever you go, and I felt incredibly melancholy after finishing the series because I was so sad to leave this world behind.

The Bookhive List is a weekly recommendation of my all-time favorite, must-read books.

What I'm Reading: 'Code Name Verity' by Elizabeth Wein

Every time I write about a YA book, I begin with the caveat that I don't often read YA. Generally speaking, I still think this is true, because in the grand scheme of all my reading material, YA probably makes up less than 5%. However, I feel the need to write disproportionately about YA books for the blog because its a genre that sees far more female success than literary fiction, and I suspect that Bookhive readers, like myself, don't read much YA fiction, and thus would appreciate thoughtful recommendations from the genre.

Thus, Code Name Verity, a YA novel that greatly benefits from its context in WWII, because it avoids one of my greatest YA pet peeves, which is an inundation of pop culture references that say more about the author than about the characters (Rainbow Rowell, I'm talking to you). The novel is told through a really tightly structured narrative of written confessions by 'Verity' a British spy captured by the Nazis in France. To describe it in more detail would be to give away far too much, because it is a serious page-turner with plenty of unexpected twists and turns. This is one of those examples of a YA book seeming like more of a marketing choice than anything else, because the characters are young, but more like young adults than teens; with the strong female-driven action adventure elements though, I can see why a publisher would see it as a natural inheritor of all that Hunger Games enthusiasm, and the fact that it's historically grounded rather than dystopian makes it a refreshing addition to a blockbuster genre of the moment. I read it fully expecting to dislike it, because the premise seemed so implausible and contrived, but I was really quickly disarmed by it.

There really is something enchanting about girls  in this context, subverting all the gender expectations they were raised with, because of a national crisis. It operates in the same space as Rosie the Riveter or Agent Peggy Carter or the truly delightful Manhattan TV series, which I cannot recommend enough.