There are many adventurous books, especially about adventures to the North. The Golden Compass is one of them. It is a fictional fantasy novel written by Phillip Pullman. This book is in the series His Dark Materials, the best known series written by the author. The story is about a brave girl’s adventure to the North to find out mysterious incidents. It has the theme of courage, intelligence and adventure, of course.
        

The main character is Lyra, a girl living in London with her mysterious uncle. She grew up with a playful childhood in a college, with her best friend Roger. They played together all the time, doing all the mischiefs. One day when Lyra slipped into the room when she was not supposed to be in, she heard some news from her uncle about the North. At the same time, children around started to disappear for no reason, and the rumors about the Gobblers (the ones who took the children, as they called) coming near spread widely. Unfortunately, Roger was among one of the children. Instantly Lyra decided to go to the North, where they say the Gobblers go, to rescue Roger. Through this Journey she will find out thousands of shocking secrets, about the North, about the Gobbler, and the most unexpected secret of all is about her family…
        

The theme of this novel are adventure, bravery and intelligence. For sure it is about adventure, Lyra was always doing adventures, either the big adventure to the North, or just exploring in the college when she used to live in. Those big and small adventures chain together, each one influencing one another, to form this whole thrilled novel. For Lyra to complete those adventure successfully, she needs great courage and intelligence, which are the exact qualities she has. She is always a strong girl, both mentally and physically, who is willing to directly face the challenges fearlessly. Over the whole story she had grown a lot and was prepared for more challenges to come.
        

The novel is told by a calm tone by the third person narrator. The tone makes you feel calm when you read on the story, although the plots may let you be excited. There are many unexpected twists in the story, really shocking hidden secrets are being revealed as you read on and that can make you shout out. Those surprises in the story make the whole book more interesting and exciting to read on. You will feel some strength to push you to read on to find our more secrets，like there is something surprising waiting ahead. Also the ending of The Golden Compass leaves great suspense. It left unfinished questions and adventures. That really makes us the readers want to read the next book in the series to find out more.
        

There are fantasy elements in the book as well, like the witches, the talking polar bears and so on. But the most unique of all are existence of the daemons, which are not seen in other fantasies. The daemons are like the souls of human, in this world every human has a daemon. There are interesting facts in the book like children’s daemons can change shapes but adult’s cannot; you can pet your own daemon but you cannot touch other’s and so on… Originally the daemons are from myths of Greek.
        

My favorite character in the book is Lord Asriel, Lyra’s uncle. He is one of the most mysterious and complex character in the book. He is ambitious, straight forward and cold on the surface. There are more hidden secrets about him to be revealed, those secrets and incidents make him a more stereo character, like a multidimensional character, and that is what makes him so attractive. It is an interesting fact that Lord Asriel is not present in the book very often, more of the time we know him by hearing others talking about him. This makes him even more mysterious. And it is a unique way to know about one character.
        

I will recommend this book to my classmates and friends. Overall it is a very interesting book to enjoy and is suitable to all age group to read. There is also a movie with the same name, it might be good to watch the movies as well after reading the book.