Children’s daemons are quite versatile and can take on any animal form, it seems, but daemons stop changing as the human grows older and more settled into who they are. A daemon completes a human, so to see a human without one is akin to seeing someone without a head, or other essential body part. It’s natural, in this world, that every human has a daemon, a being in the form of an animal that’s an outward expression of the human’s inner self. In this book, the story is set in a world that mirrors our own and is centered on Lyra Belacqua, a brave golden-haired girl who’s supposedly an orphan, which is why she’s raised among the Scholars of Jordan College (which I thought of as the equivalent of Oxford) - the only girl there as women are not often Scholars. The Golden Compass is the first novel in a young-adult fantasy series. Reading it in 2023 was the best time to pick it up. I’d attempted it shortly after graduating college, but didn’t feel drawn to the story and had difficulty with the concept of daemons, so I gave up on the book but vowed to return to it when I felt more receptive to the story. The Golden Compass is a book I’ve wanted to read for over 10 years now, but I kept putting it off. You're never too old to dive back into a nuanced fantasy series.This was a delightful read. When I reread the books as a teenager, though, it was a completely different series, with a complex exploration of morality and some weird quantum physics nonsense going on. As far as I was concerned, it was just a terrific adventure about a little girl with a cool pet and a friend who was a bear. but I'm pretty sure all the critiques of government and organized religion flew right over my head. When I first read The Golden Compass in fourth grade, I remember liking it. His Dark Materials is one of those book series that grows up along with you. So if you, like me, cannot possibly wait two whole seasons for the first Book of Dust installment, here are a few books to tide you over while you wait. The new trilogy will be called The Book of Dust, and I'm extremely ready.

That means a whole new generation of online 'What's Your Daemon?' quizzes. That means three new books about Lyra's world(s), starting with the first one this fall. Golden Compass author Philip Pullman is writing a whole new spin-off series.

Golden compass series