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Then came the wonderful days of Enid Blyton, from which I garnered valuable life lessons such as what happened to the Famous Five when they Went Somewhere and Did Something. When I was 11 my Dad read me The Lord Of The Rings, which was brilliant not only because it’s a fantastic work of fiction, but because Dad had a different voice for every character. The best bit was when we met Treebeard, as he literally took an hour to say one sentence. The Ent Moot took about four months to get through.
Then I became a teenager and hit that awkward-teenage-girl-identity-crisis phase that all teenage girls go through (yawn), and it was at this point that I read Sabriel. Author Garth Nix constructs a world where to very separate countries exist: to the south lies Ancelstierre, a land vaguely similar to 1920s Britain, and to the north there is the Old Kingdom, a land of magic and mystery where the dead roam free. It is the job of the Abhorsen, Sabriel’s father, to send the dead back into death. But when the Abhorsen goes missing, our heroine must leave her comfortable life in an Ancelstierre girls boarding school, take up her inheritance, find her father, reinstate the rulers of the Old Kingdom and deal with an army of the undead. Sabriel isn’t entirely alone in this quest; she has help in the form of a talking cat called Mogget, who is sarcastic and lazy in equal measures. (Every book should have one of these. It would have enlivened the Ent Moot considerably.)
Sabriel is a comparatively dark adventure, a world away from the standard girly trash (Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging springs to mind), but it’s still essentially about a teenager discovering her identity. Ok, so a book about a teenage girl that inherits the ability to walk among the dead, saves the world and falls in love in the space of 300 pages may not have been the identity I was looking for, but it was a form of escapism that definitely helped. It’s a well constructed and well written story that hits the ground running and doesn’t let up. I must have read that and the other two in the series, Lirael and Abhorsen at least twelve times before the age of fifteen, and it remains to this day one of my favourite books.
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