Tower of Iron Will

Pullman continues to turn C.S. Lewis upside down and backwards in the second volume of His Dark Materials trilogy. Children travel to other worlds through invisible portals, but in these worlds witches are good and churchmen are wicked, and the ultimate enemy is God. The talking armored bears of The Golden Compass are sorely missed in this volume; instead we get the Specters of indifference that drain the will to live out of adults. Very reminiscent of Harry Potter's Dementors, but Pullman beat Rowling to the idea by about two years. That is a lot of nonsense talk about dark matter and angels and the I Ching, but Pullman is a master storyteller and I still have no idea where this story is going.