Sabriel

Garth Nix's Sabriel is a YA fantasy novel; it came to me highly recommended so I will summarize reasons why, reading it in 2020 as certainly an adult, I did not like it and don't recommend it. I don't mean to cast aspersions on youthful readers who enjoyed the book, but it has... issues.

Nominally, it is about a teenage girl who has magical gifts that allow her to enter the realm of Death and, variously, make things more permanently dead or bring them sort-of back to life. That's all you need to know.

The book is going through puberty SO HARD RIGHT NOW

This is my conclusion based on the nails-on-blackboard effect of unwelcome pubescent interjections into the otherwise adventure- and magic-based narrative.

We learn that because "there was minimal sex education" and "None of Sabriel's friends had reached puberty before her, so in fear and desperation she had entered Death" (17%) which seems a pretty dire thing to do in lieu of, I don't know, borrowing a book from the library or walking in to town and asking some responsible-looking adults about it. This is a truly horrible fantasy-world characterization of sex education, general education, learning, curiosity, puberty, and how serious necromantic magic is. Every single time that she enters Death it is given the stakes that she might die ("For Sabriel to enter Death seemed madness, temping fate." 66%), so I HOPE there is literally any other recourse to getting information about puberty.

The descriptions of the glaringly obvious romantic interest start with him being discovered, fully nude. The circumcision status of his penis is described; my personal reading notes say "this had better be significant later". (NARRATOR: It was not.) Later we get to hear about how his thighs are so muscled that he cannot put on pants. Even later we are treated to a gratuitous description of his rippling abs --- under his clothes --- during a fight scene.

Then for the rest of the book we just hear about people getting "flushed" and, occasionally, kissing each other on the forehead or sneakily intertwining pinkies to hold hands. It's as if the narration wants to be erotic, but is constrained by the imagination of a not-particularly-well-read 10-year-old. (They do kiss at least one time in order to COUNTERACT THE MOST POWERFUL DEATH-MAGIC THAT EXISTS IN THE WORLD; one teenage kiss is apparently sufficient, suggesting that the true magic is horniness.)

Everyone is constantly running, and extremely exhausted, but somehow manages to run even harder than before

This did not work to heighten the stakes any of the times it was used. It did heighten my irritation. After discovering previously-unbelievable athletic depth after the last handful of times that they were so-exhausted-they-could-run-no-further, why would I now feel any tension at the mention that they are so-exhausted-they-could-run-no-further? If anything, it just alerted me that they would, in fact, be required to run a bit further, because: drama.

Forced bathing scenes

At least twice, we have to read meticulously-detailed descriptions of scenes where Sabriel is forcibly stripped and bathed. This was uncomfortable and served no purpose except to repeatedly detail that it happened --- we don't even get any internal monologue or self-reflection to justify it. Yikes.

Unpalatable writing style

• Every single character was blindingly Obviously Significant to the Plot.
• The bad guy's name is a good guy's name, reversed --- oh, wow, it turns out they are the same person after hundreds of years of sinister magic!
• Sabriel has read the obviously significant Book of the Dead but can't remember pages from it except under duress in situations where suddenly magically remembering a page of a book would solve the problem; this is true even though she is literally carrying the book with her for most of the adventure.
• Putting earrings into already-pierced ears is an action that is described as causing bloody smears all over the ear-region (personal reading note: "not how earrings work").
• The characters, even those whose inner thoughts we got to hear, were extremely boring and flat, with no actual personality. First impressions and stereotypes were 100% accurate.
• There were two consecutive chapters where characters had to narrative-dump the entire plan of Team Evil Kill Everything And Live In Zombieland AND the entire plan to countermand it by Team Good, Chaste, and Hand-Holding. This despite the fact that the entire plot had been signposted SO HARD in every other clue and revelation for the entire book. Youthful readers are smart and I felt condescended-to on behalf of literate preteens everywhere.

At one point during some completely unjustified anger at the father she has literally spent 70% of the book questing to rescue, we read "He hardly seemed to notice her, except as a repository for numerous revelations and as an agent to deal with [Bad Guy]." (73%) My personal notes read: "I feel same." It was just not possible to start caring about any of the characters, or the stakes, or even whether it was an interesting set-up.

Maybe YA books are not for me

To be clear, I abandoned this book with maybe 10% left so I cannot tell you if it has an incredible conclusion that makes it all worthwhile. (The Wikipedia plot summary indicates: it does not. She's not allowed to die for narrative reasons!?!? Argh.)

Also, though: the world is teetering in such a fragile way... the destruction of ancient magical contracts is described as releasing so much uncontrollable magic that everyone will die and Zombies Will Rule Forever. So it's not clear how the ancient magical contracts got established in the first place, since the baseline level of magic is constant. This is the most charitable review I could give this book: the worldbuilding made no sense (and everything else about it was terrible, shallow, and bad). The conclusion seems to be: follow the rules that adults give you, do the work they assign, don't ask questions, don't think independently, don't make any choices, and despite getting stellar grades at expensive boarding school, you will still be atrociously bad at everything, but: shrug. You get to take baths and sometimes hold hands with a boy!

This post's theme word is verbigerate (v intr), "to obsessively repeat meaningless words and phrases." The word "charter" is verbigerated so often that it quickly reached semantic satiation.