The Book of the Remembrancer

Book Review: Lirael by Garth Nix

Lirael is the second book in Garth Nix's "Abhorsen Trilogy".  Unfortunately, this semester has been quite busy and I was only just able to finish it this past week--two months after finishing the first book Sabriel (and having to pause on the last 70ish pages of this over 700ish monster while I went to Mexico over Thanksgiving week...). Despite its size, and the forced pauses in between, the pages seemed to have flown by and there never seemed a dull moment.

To avoid any potential spoilers for the first book in the series, this is going to have to be pretty vague~

In this installment of the "Abhorsen Trilogy", we meet some new characters (like Lirael) that do have some connection to the characters of the first story. While I miss the characters of the first book I'd grown attached to, Lirael's rather... depressive personality was interesting once I'd pulled apart the different dimension and motivations of it. Especially the way that she changed her focus, seemingly without realizing it.




(This is all too vague. Spoilers will now commence)



At first I thought her single-minded desire to possess The Sight and to be a "true Daughter of the Clayr" was annoying and childish. But then I thought, how ostracizing must that feel, to be in such a closed society and to not have even the most fundamental of skills? It would be like how Link would have felt if a fairy had never come to him since he wasn't a true Kokiri child; It would be how Neville would have felt if his grandmother's fears had been true and he really was a squib and he never got his Hogwarts letter; It was how Charlotte Lucas began to feel and why she decided to marry Mr. Collins. That anxiety and fear that there is something fundamentally wrong with you, that you are somehow other from all of your peers, and that it makes you less of a person is a very heavy thing to deal with. I think Garth Nix very accurately portrayed what that anxiety and paranoia would do to a person and how it would color their interactions with other people and the world in general. So while she just seemed to be whining at first, I came to appreciate and root for her as the story went on.

And now for Sameth. He was so capable, selfless, and brave in that first glimpse of him across the wall that the young man he is portrayed as at home afterwards (shirking responsibilities, hiding from people, and incapacitated by fear) was quite surprising. However, he admitted to never fitting in there due to the assumption that he would take up the mantle of the Abhorsen. He'd been touched by Death, and in the time it took for him to reclaim that piece of his soul the doubt in himself was overwhelming to the point where anything he could accomplish would have been better than the disappointment of inaction towards The Book of the Dead. And so he left. He wants to be useful, but going into Death (quite rightly) terrifies him, and so he also feels that he is a failure and will not be accepted by his peers/family.

Lirael and Sameth both have growing up that they need to do, and unfortunately there are quite dire circumstances that must be dealt with, so they are doing the best that they can.