Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Fourteen is pretty grown in every fourteen-year-old's mind.

I had experienced a lot o things by the time I turned fourteen. Mostly good. Some bad. A few ugly enough to make me cling to childhood's cloak more insistently than ever. I could tell I wasn't to be a 'successful teenager'. I didn't speak the language of this strange new country. There were whole libraries worth of knowledge that seemed to be passing straight over my head.

This wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't been, in my own mind, such a successful child. I was good-natured and just rebellious enough to entertain my family. I let myself be dressed up, I was never bored and excellent at inventing my own games and stories. I was the cleverest and the funniest of my friends. Basically, like all children, I was full of possibility.

So when adulthood beckoned, I retreated into reading, and in between the wait for some Potter book, I stumbled across HDM. I loved Northern Lights. I loved the half-wild child Lyra, and the frozen country she explored without the slightest bit of caution.

The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass teenage me did not enjoy. I chalked it up to all sorts of things. Pullman gets fairly metaphysical in parts of the later volumes, references a lot of work I'd never heard of, my favourite character Mrs Coulter was barely present, and I thought, like so many other YA books, that the series had just lost focus.

I was wrong.

Northern Lights was a child's journey. An excellent one, but a child's one nonetheless. But Subtle Knife and Amber Spyglass are books about growing up. Where Northern Lights is 'innocence' they are 'experience'.

I had no patience for experience. It didn't come naturally to me, so I tried to avoid it for many more years. I wanted to stay little and loved and move through the world without taking responsibility. This is getting very deep for a book review, but I honestly feel these books came back to me right when I needed them most.

I'm twenty-eight now. I don't think I'm very grown, but at the same time I feel more grown than ever. I'm far away from home, I could cry every day, but at the same time I'm right where I'm meant to be. I feel like if I had a daemon, now is when he would have settled, or I would have come to appreciate his form.

This might be the first 'young adult' book that has grown richer since I read it first.