Once Upon a Time in the North
Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2008
Fantasy Fiction
ISBN: 0375845100
112 pages
Synopsis
In his younger years that we’ve seen him previously in the His Dark Materials trilogy, aeronaut Lee Scoresby is a young adventurer ready to take on the world. He’s just won his balloon in a card match, and he takes it wherever the wind blows. These particular winds land him in the Arctic, on a secluded island known as Novy Odense. Soon, he discovers that there’s an internal political battle going on that he’s quickly swept into. Tensions are high, and a confrontation mounts between the sides, forcing Lee to choose. It during these scuffles that he meets and befriends Iorek Byrnison, then a young polar bear who’s fighting with the political side that favors the bears.
Critique
Much like Lyra’s Oxford, this is a book that is wonderful as a companion novel, but wouldn’t stand well on its own. It is a fun, quick read with some action and drama peppered throughout, but mostly it’s a ‘guilty pleasure’ of sorts for fans of the His Dark Materials trilogy to get more about the world and the characters that Pullman so deftly created. Also, one of the best aspects to this book is the binding and that it comes with a cool little card game that Pullman invented. It’s truly more of a collector’s item that just a book, which makes it cool to own.
The other books in this series are The Golden Compass (book 1), The Subtle Knife (book 2), The Amber Spyglass (book 3), and Lyra’s Oxford as a companion novel.
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For the Classroom
Since this book takes place in an entirely different world, there’s not much that can be used for the classroom.
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