Christina
The best and most interesting part of this book is that it takes the most normal, ordinary situations and makes disaster look...inevitable.
About a man pushed to his absolute limit, and a boy who learns from his father how to deal with that. Who learns that violence and secrets are okay and even natural.
The writer does a great job of conveying our main character, Paul, as someone we think is open-minded or “woke” at first, while harbouring a terrible secret. And only the story and events told in his own voice, made to sound understandable or even normal, reveals to us, bit by bit, how not normal, how incomprehensible, some of his actions are. His voice, increasingly paranoid and mean-spirited, takes us on a journey into his mind and heart.
Well worth listening to, as well. This book does very well in audio format.
I liked a lot of the over-arching themes of this, but I gotta say that seeing it from Lyra's POV was great in that it sounded like her, and horrible in that I wanted more knowledge in the way this world worked.
And I listened to it via audiobook, so I may have missed it, but I never did find out about the Master's attempted poison of the dad. I mean, I get it by the end, but it was a thing that stuck in my mind the entire book, and never really got talked about again. I'm guessing the master was trying to poison him because of his intention to kill a child. I wanted more, I guess, is what I'm saying.
Everyone, everyone ever, needs to read this book.
There's this idea that Hitler got to power on his voice alone. That's just not true. A lot of people had to enable him to get to the height he did, lots of people had to accept and believe in Nazism to keep it going. People who hated him and what he stood for made deals with him to try to gain their own power. And the world suffered.
Hitler is a monster, but bigger than that, he enabled monstrosity and allowed it to thrive.
Read this book.
