[Where to even begin with this turkey? The first half reads like Pullman had a word count he wanted to meet and he would write anything to reach it, knowing that fans would lap it up regardless. Even writing about what characters were having for dinner. Or breakfast. Or lunch. Or snacks. Or to drink. So much repetitive, unnecessary text! So many characters sitting around and telling each other what they know, and what they just found out. So much... BOREDOM. So little happens in the first half that it could have been about a third of the length. Or you could even start reading about halfway through, and you'd probably pick up enough of what was going on.Not that I can really recommend the second half, either. Sure, some stuff happens. But it's a confused, tone-deaf, tedious (that word again) mess. The first half sets up so little magic that when some magical episodes finally happen, they seem completely out-of-place, disconnected from the main story. Malcolm and Alice don't react the way they should given their mundane humdrum lives up to this point. And the stakes continue to feel incredibly low because we know Lyra survives. The worst three chapters would probably be the best if this book had set them up and then used them properly, to wit:- The creepy fairy who breastfeeds Lyra, a scene which Pullman manages to write as if he is utterly disgusted with this basic functionality of female mammal bodies. Why is she so stupid? Why is her food magical? Did the eggs come from magic hens? Has she just been standing on top of a hill for a thousand years waiting for a flood? Why do we care about any of this?- The "forgetting" party where people have left their worries on the other side of the fog. Why is this underwater? How did these people get here? Why is the food real? (They take some with them afterwards!) Have the servants forgotten too? If not, who the hell are they? And most importantly, how does Bonneville end up at the house and why can he talk to the forgetters? (More on Bonneville later);- The witch who literally drops in and out of the story to remind them that Lyra is the subject of a prophecy which will be important. (But doesn't say that this will be in TEN YEARS' TIME.)A lot of the second half is also about baby care during a flood. I was so sick of reading "them ones that you throw away" in reference to disposable nappies, and hearing about them mixing and heating "milk powder" (top tip: that would starve a six-month-old; they need breastmilk or formula). Did there really need to be TWO pharmacy looting scenes? Two? It's just appallingly boring to read about.Unlike the original series, the worldbuilding is halfhearted. The Magisterium seems to be split into about a million small independent factions who are all working around and about each other to find/hide Lyra. There's also a semi-secret government service who are also trying to find/hide Lyra. For some completely unexplained reasons, both sides wait until Lyra is no longer in the place where they all know she is, and then suddenly to try to kidnap her. And then they mysteriously have loads of boats, and perfect communications, and perfect ideas of where she would have gone, even in the middle of the greatest natural disaster ever to hit this version of the UK. Doesn't anyone have anything better to do? If she was so important, why not kidnap her before the flood?As for the flood itself, it's just... odd. The death and damage count seems to be much lower than the level of water would imply (they see one dead body; I sincerely believe there would be tens of thousands in that part of the world, not to mention the animals...). Everyone is very chilled-out about it. "Oh hey, are you OK? There's a shelter down the street. Please don't loot that building." "Oh hi, we've been living in a cave for a few weeks, want to come join us?" And if you need to contact the Magisterium, you can find your contact even if you're an eight-year-old boy living in a cave. Oh and everyone knows who Lyra is and who she's travelling with. Someone put out a magic APB?Bonneville is the crappiest, most ridiculous villain I have ever had the misfortune of reading about. So he's a brilliant physicist but he also has a creepy weird nasty hyena who basically alerts all other adults that he is a nasty sexual deviant. Er, how did he get funding if he creeps everyone out all the time? And who the hell trained a PhD physicist in extreme combat techniques? Or was it the other way around? Why did a hardened mercenary get into physics? Either way it's completely bonkers. How does he read the aletheiometer? More to the point, how the HELL does he keep finding Malcolm, Alice, and Lyra WITHOUT the aletheiometer? Why, when he does find them, does he casually murder a fully grown and armed adult male, but whisper ghost stories to try to defeat a bunch of children?Speaking of weird sexual deviants, let's talk about the sex in this book. Or sorry, I should probably say, the paedophilia and rape in this book. Because there are absolutely no normal, loving, realistic examples of sexual relations, only frankly quite nasty scenes of and references to paedophilia and rape. Bonneville apparently will have his way with any and every female regardless of age and consent. And Oakley Street are happy to use kids as bait for paedophiles in order to blackmail Magisterium members. (Not that that would even work, because a) when has the Catholic church ever cared about paedophilia and b) these are people who PERFORM SOUL-DESTROYING EXPERIMENTS ON CHILDREN; they'd probably just give the guy a promotion.) Compared to the sweet and YA-appropriate romances and references to sex in the original series, this book is sickening and depressing. (Also, what's with all the swearing??)Which leads me to characters. Malcolm is THE MOST naive eleven-year-old I have ever seen. Despite working at an inn (read: a medieval motel) he has somehow completely oblivious to normal male-female relations and has not the slightest idea of where babies come from. I'm sorry but... BOLLOCKS. If he worked on a distant, same-sex, vegetarian farm, maybe? If he grew up with monks? But working at an INN? Utter tripe that he'd be as totally ignorant as he is here. Despite this naivety, he can pick up, and *make progress with* the quantum mechanics of consciousness just over a few conversations. And he can fix literally anything (the first half gives about 4,000,000 examples, in excruciating detail). Oh, and even though he gets scared, he absolutely always does the right thing, and has trouble telling any lies at all. He is... totally and utterly unbelievable.Alice is a boring cypher. She may have suffered some form of abuse in the past but Pullman doesn't dwell and she's left in the background changing nappies for 99% of the book, only popping up occasionally to be further abused or once or twice to swear and kick things. The adult characters only exist for exposition and to move the story along (or, more often, exposit the story at each other). And don't get me started on the ridiculous name dropping of characters from the previous books. A totally pointless scene with Mrs Coulter. A few with Lord Asriel. Way too much random focus on Bud and Coram. And everyone seems to have had some kind of personality transplant from what I remember of the previous books. Coulter wants to find out where Lyra is... but she only just gave her up for adoption?! Asriel wants to spend a sentimental evening with his baby daughter... but in the original series he's a ruthless bastard, not sentimental at all. I just can't even.All the magic seems to be working slightly differently, too. People routinely talk to each others' daemons. When did that become a thing? The daemons interact with the world a lot more, apparently even urinating all over it (what? do they drink water as well? is the pee magic?) You can now separate from your daemon just by walking up a hill, no River of Styx necessary. Aletheiometers can be checked out from your local library and there's no automatic excommunication and death sentence. Weird spangly things happen to Malcolm's eyes and aren't explained. The characters speculate on what happens to daemons when people die, their daemons freak out about it, and then when they MURDER A GUY in the next chapter, they don't check to see what happened to his daemon, even though the weirdness of his daemon had been built up for the whole book. Shonky, shonky, shonky.To use some movie analogies, this book is like Prometheus, or even *shudder* the Phantom Menace. It exists to explain some things that really never needed explaining; in this case, how Lyra got from being a lovechild of Coulter and Asriel to being an "orphan" at Jordan College. So everything just happens in order for her to move from the first point to the last point. It's not organic. It's not innovative. And worst, it's not even interesting. It's pages and pages of people sitting around talking to each other, falling asleep, and changing nappies.My youngest sister and I read this book at the same time and we both started out with very high hopes. We were being super careful to avoid spoiling anything for our middle sister. But by the end, we were angrily whispering to each other, and making increasingly obvious references to what was going on, until we turned to our sister and said: honestly, don't read it. Instead, reread His Dark Materials, and pretend this aberration was never written, let alone printed. (hide spoiler)