Prequel to the His Dark Materials novels which kind of sets up the beginning of The Golden Compass. I was basically reading this to get to the next book & see what happens to the characters from the Golden Compass, but Pullman introduced a bunch of new characters for me to care about. I was surprised how invested I got in the new characters. Gets at least as weird & trippy as The Amber Spyglass, & has a high mysteriousness factor, which is probably an indication of what the rest of the series has in store. Can't wait to read the next book, although maybe I should have waited until the 3rd part of Book of Dust gets released to start reading this one.