The Shadow in the North

September 1, 1989
This comical adventure about a girl who longs to follow in her father's footsteps crackles with Pullman's (The Golden Compass; Clockwork) usual flair. Lila desperately wants to be a firework-maker like her widower father. Although he has raised her amid the dancing sparks, he wants her to have a husband rather than a vocation. With the help of her entrepreneurial friend Chulak, the personal servant to the king's talking white elephant, Lila tricks her father into revealing the secret to his profession, then bravely departs to retrieve the royal sulphur from Razvani the Fire-Fiend at the heart of a volcano. Pullman marries elements of fairy tale with slapstick humor as Lila outwits a vaudevillian band of pirates and scales jagged mountains on her quest. Gallagher's (Blue Willow, reviewed above) softly focused graphite drawings lend magical mystery as Lila fearfully contemplates the dancing fire imps at Mount Merapi and emphasize the absurdity as the elephant, his flanks emblazoned with advertisements, kneels before the Goddess of the Lake in order to save Lila from Razvani. If the tale, first published in Britain in 1995, isn't as polished as Pullman's other works, it's worth the trip just for the climactic fireworks scene in which Lila gets to show her stuff. Ages 8-12. (Oct.) FYI: As of September, Pullman's Sally Lockhart Trilogy is being reissued in paperback: The Ruby in the Smoke; The Shadow in the North; and The Tiger in the Well; as well as The Tin Princess, which features characters from the trilogy.

April 1, 1988
Readers first met the intelligent, inquisitive and independent Sally Lockhart in The Ruby in the Smoke. Now comes this second brilliant bauble, perhaps more foreboding and terrifying than the first, thanks to Pullman's care in creating lively, superheroic characters and then, just as heroically, killing them off. Six years after the close of the first book, Sallynow 22 and still galloping over Victorian conventionsis embroiled in high-level business and government fraud; lest this sound dry, there is also a secret weapon ("the shadow'' of the title) under development north of London that, in this setting, is as threatening as a nuclear arsenal. The mystery has many more tangled elements than the first tale, but they are all untangled and quite elegantly tied up; readers will weep at the deeds of true villainy and smile through their tears at the close, as they are offered Sally's radiant look to the future, to unfold in a promised final volume of the trilogy. Ages 12-up.