This book was hard to read, but not for the reasons you’re probably thinking of.



Garth Nix’s writing was the best it’s ever been. It’s not my favorite style, but I like it nonetheless. The plot was engaging, the pacing was good – not fantastic, but not widely variable or unbearably slow – and the worldbuilding was, as usual, wonderful.



This was hard for me to read because Clariel reminded me a lot of myself when I was younger.



My parents took me out of the public school system after 8th grade and e

This book was hard to read, but not for the reasons you’re probably thinking of.Garth Nix’s writing was the best it’s ever been. It’s not my favorite style, but I like it nonetheless. The plot was engaging, the pacing was good – not fantastic, but not widely variable or unbearably slow – and the worldbuilding was, as usual, wonderful.This was hard for me to read because Clariel reminded me a lot of myself when I was younger.My parents took me out of the public school system after 8th grade and enrolled me in a private school for 9th grade. They destroyed my social support and threw my academics off-track, and I’ve never let them forget that they deliberately ignored me and my protests through the whole process.The whole time I was reading this book, every time Clariel expressed her single-minded desire to go back home, it was very hard to not throw all my support behind her. I was never quiet about the fact that I didn’t want to be in private school; it was obnoxious and unkind to the friends I made that year, but for me leaving was the most important thing in the world, and I was never going to let anyone forget that.But what I learned at that school was that I didn’t know myself as well as I thought I did. When you spend your whole life in one environment, it’s very hard to separate yourself from your surroundings. And for all that we strive to make our environments suit us, we often grow more, and learn more about ourselves, in unfamiliar settings.Many of the assumptions I’d made about myself through life were proven wrong in 9th grade – that I couldn’t make friends, that I could be a one-woman island against the world, but also the idea that I should force myself to talk to people even when I wasn’t comfortable. Hell, I developed most of my social skills that year.So it was very, very hard for me to not root for Clariel in her quest to get back to the forests; it was equally hard for me to disapprove of her parents’ arguments that she would grow to like Belisaere, make friends and adapt to the new environment.I don’t agree with the people whose reactions to the book were negative because Clariel’s character was selfish, impulsive and unwise for the decisions she made and the beings she trusted. Not because it’s untrue (it is very true, in fact), but because I myself contemplated doing things relatively as drastic as what she did, and if I’d had more backbone and been less indecisive, I would have gone through with them – and they would had backfired as dramatically as Clariel’s actions did.And that’s what I think Garth Nix was trying to portray with this book: that period in every person’s life when they’re forced out of their comfort zone and into alien environments, forced to interact with new people; and how their reactions and ultimate success or failure with the change is influenced so much by who they are and who surrounds them and does, or doesn’t, support them.And part of the reason I think this worked so well was that this book is the other side of the Old Kingdom Universe coin, a foil to the first three books.andtell the stories of young women who haven’t found their places yet, who are thrown out of their comfort zones into truly brutal environments and forced with very little support to discover their destinies and save the world – and they succeed spectacularly.But the exact opposite happens to Clariel – the environment she’s forced into isn’t hostile; she has a multitude of possible friends and mentors, numerous new skills she could learn and become competent at. The possibilities are endless, her future completely in her hands.And the tragedy of it all is that, even with all this potential, Clariel is still completely isolated and fails miserably at anything she attempts. Her friends and mentors have their own agendas; she is given no time to adjust to Belisaere before being given responsibility far beyond her capabilities; and her own stubborn loner personality prevents her from reaching out to the right people, asking for help at the right times – even recognizing possible dangers until it’s too late. Out of the perfect situation is created the perfect storm.So ofthe pacing of the story is going to be rough, ofthe best characters are going to be underutilized – if the story had been steadier, if the right characters had been present, then Clariel wouldn’t have turned out the way she did.The people who are supposed to be role models, whose jobs it is to take care of the Kingdom and its people, are so wrapped up in their own wants, their own personal grudges, that a very stable situation turns to shit in a matter of weeks. They have all the resources, all the energy and all the time in the world to do their jobs, and they waste all of it completely. And Clariel is caught in the middle of this whole mess, disoriented and alone,Another complaint I saw was that this wasn’t a whole story, that it felt like a rough draft that was missing a good conclusion and a good protagonist. And they’re right, this wasn’t a complete story and it did lack a sympathetic protagonist.isn’t a full story: it’s a snippet, a couple weeks pulled from history to help us understand how things were and how they came to be what they are now. No, the story didn’t finished: we didn’t get to see all of Clariel’s history, only the beginning of her descent into the horrifying Greater Dead creature we saw inand. Nix purposefully leaves the rest of the story untold, forcing us to imagine how far both Clariel/Chlorr and the Old Kingdom have come in the intervening 600 years. One of my complaints aboutis that we were told very little about how the Old Kingdom was in Touchstone’s time, forced (again) to imagine how it was and how it came to be what it was in Sabriel’s time. I thinkfulfills that role – it creates a third point of reference so that we can better track the changes to the Old Kingdom over time.That’s why the book was so worldbuilding-heavy, and why Clariel’s story took a backseat at times to the machinations and worries of other characters. This book was the tale of a participant in a larger story, a few weeks during a minor crisis – in a history of the Old Kingdom, Clariel, daughter of Jaciel and Harven, would be a footnote, perhaps not even given a paragraph in the chapter of the 1300s AW.This story is completely Clariel’s, her point-of-view on full display and her experiences in detail. But it’s also not hers at all, because she’s only one cog in the greater political and magical machines of the Old Kingdom.So don’t be so hard on the book – it wasn’t supposed to be a regular book, and I don’t think it would’ve been any good if Nix had written it as such.Pre-read obsessive updating has been deleted to save characters, but I've kept the art links. art ! Also, the new cover artist, Sebastian Ciaffaglione, is on tumblr ! He's been posting some Old Kingdom art along with original and other series' art. A Sabriel sketch and some back cover monsters Lirael and Sabriel . The British hardcover art for more Sabriel , and all nine gates of Death , traveled by Lirael and illustrated by Laura Tolton the Great. Art on Laura Tolton the Great 's tumblr and a whole blog of art . And to the user named Astarael: I shall share our shared bell (and my tumblr url). Will I do this for anybody else with a bell-themed goodreads name? No. Nobody talks about the bells at all, it's annoying. And lastly, art