Sabriel by Garth Nix

Sabriel is a coming of age story about an eighteen year old girl called Sabriel. She has grown up at a boarding school in the safety of a non-magical town but has been taught some magic as she has the ability. She often speaks to her father who is a kind of necromancer across The Wall where magic is everywhere. Instead of raising the dead, he father helps people pass through who are having difficulty and are stuck between the living and the dead. When Sabriel’s father goes missing, presumed dead, she must cross The Wall in order to save him so he can defeat the darkness that is falling over the world now that he isn’t there to keep it at bay.

I quite liked Sabriel as a character but she was a little bit annoying at times and I just wanted to slap her and tell her to get on with it. She seemed to hesitate quite a lot when told to do something when she was in danger. Thankfully she acquires some companions along the way who help her and take some of the focus off her. If it had been her doing this by herself it would have been a struggle to get through it. Really it was only the middle that annoyed me, but I suppose getting used to a lot of magic bombarding you and being able to feel people die can’t be all that nice.

The world that Garth Nix has created is intriguing in that a Wall is all that separates two very different places. On the predominately non-magic side the Wall is guarded in case anything dead that has been resurrected tries to come through. Only those who live near to the Wall realise how dangerous it can be for the people living on the other side. The non-magic side is essentially early 20^th century with cars and electricity, but the magic side has none of that. The people on the magic side have magic to get light and can make their own machines to move around. Each side knows the other is there but has no desire to communicate with each other because they have no need to.

The story draws you in and makes you want to keep reading. However, for me, I would have liked a bit more description of the places they visit. It seemed a bit action sequence after action sequence with very little respite in between. The ending dragged on a bit as well, I realise that the author wanted to build up plenty of suspense but getting chased by the living dead is scary enough. He does leave plenty of questions to be answered in the next two books which is good. It isn’t on a proper cliffhanger or anything but enough to leave you curious as to how everyone recovers from the events in Sabriel.

I enjoyed this book and it’s a good start for getting in to fantasy novels and novels about magic that aren’t Harry Potter. I like the way magic works in this world. It’s not about waving a wand and saying some words, it’s about creating what you need with your thoughts. It is a book for young people but the main character is slightly older than your average book, being late teens rather than middle teens. This didn’t always come across but you did feel Sabriel had a bit more maturity, which was required of her. Like a lot of fantasy books, it had a map of the land in the front but I would have liked a bit more detail as the scale didn’t quite fit in my mind with how far they’d gone and how long it had taken. I will be reading the others in the series to find out what happens.

Overall rating 3 out of 5.