I really enjoyed this one!

Even though there wasn't an extensive amount of character development, it didn't matter to me at all because Sabriel is an absolute badass.

Her actions and abilities throughout the story were truly captivating.

I found myself completely immersed in her adventures and the unique world that was created.

The plot was engaging and full of twists and turns that kept me on the edge of my seat.

Despite the lack of in-depth character exploration, Sabriel's personality shone through brightly.

She was confident,勇敢, and resourceful, which made her a truly likable and relatable protagonist.

I'm extremely excited for the sequel and can't wait to see what further adventures Sabriel will embark on.

I'm sure it will be just as精彩 as the first book.

3.5 stars

Death and what came after death was no great mystery to Sabriel. She just wished it was. Sabriel and her father possess a very unique brand of magic. They can communicate with the dead and the damned from the Old Kingdom. Only they have the ability to confront such creatures and send them back to the gates of death.

Then, during the first semester of Sabriel's school, her father, the Abhorsen, goes missing and Sabriel is unwittingly promoted to the Abhorson. With the dead creeping ever closer to her friends and countrymen, Sabriel must embark on a journey to find her father before it's too late and he traverses through one gate of death too many.

I've heard so many wonderful things about this one that I expected a little bit more. However, I just never felt a connection to this book - the magic, the characters, the plot - all seemed rather meh to me. This book relies heavily on Charter Magic, which involves speaking certain words and following strict rules that are never fully explained to the audience. The most frustrating part is that there's no build to the magic, it's just there. It's like jumping into the seventh Harry Potter book without the first few novels of magical background - frustratingly complex.

The other thing that really bugged me was the "love" interest. Sabriel and the "love" interest were essentially acquaintances, but all of a sudden, before the big battle, this happens: "I love you," he whispered. "I hope you don't mind." And I'm just sitting there like, what? When did this happen? Between the magic mayhem and the bland-to-non-existent-love, I never formed an emotional connection to any of the main characters or the plot (other than Mogget - Mogget was the shining star in the clouded night).

It felt like I was being dragged on a journey rather than eagerly plunging into a new series. Maybe I'll feel more connected in book 2? Anyone else feel the same?

Audiobook Comments

Read by Tim Curry - and honestly this audio did the book NO favors. It was SO frustrating to have all these really cool concepts and absolutely NO excitement from the narrator. No tone. No characterization - other than Mogget.

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4.5 stars

Nov 2021. After reading the new prequel: Terciel and Elinor, I found myself deeply inspired to do a reread of this wonderful book. And I'm glad I did. This book still holds up extremely well. It presents a beautifully well-drawn and utterly captivating world. The magic within it is truly interesting, adding an extra layer of allure. The two lead characters are highly likeable, and their journey throughout the story is engaging. Additionally, the presence of a magical cat brings an element of charm and mystery. I have to mention that I also have a great love for the concepts of the Charter and the bells. They add a unique and fascinating aspect to the overall narrative. This book is truly a gem that continues to shine brightly, even after multiple reads.

Bullet Review:

I have a great deal to express regarding this, yet I'm on my phone at an airport during a layover, so I'll pen down my comprehensive thoughts later.

In the meantime:

Hurray for female protagonists!

Hurray for fantasy!

Huh for what "time period" this belongs to.

Huh for the strange, out-of-the-blue forced romance.

Huh/Yay?! For the magic.

Nevertheless, I would likely read further and wouldn't hesitate to recommend this, especially to young adults with a caution about slight gore.

Full Review:

Sabriel is attending boarding school in Ancelstierre when she receives a ghostly message from her father. She takes her father's sword and belt of necromancer bells and departs for the Old World to discover what happened to him. Along the way, she teams up with a white cat, Mogget, and Touchstone and ventures into the lands of the Dead and Nearly Dead.

Fantasy is a genre abundant with men performing remarkable deeds, but not as many women. And if there is only one aspect I get to praise about Sabriel, it is this: Sabriel is an extremely badass female character.

Abhorsen, Sabriel's father, has essentially been training her to be a prominent necromancer her entire life - so when he vanishes, she doesn't for a moment flounder, wallow, or whine about what has occurred. Nope. She immediately gears up and heads to the border to go to the Old World. She battles the Dead, often single-handedly, and she doesn't end up on the ground crying for help every time she gets a minor injury. Sure, sometimes she requires Mogget or Touchstone to rescue her - but that's what companions are for. In my opinion, you are permitted to need to be saved偶尔, as long as the rest of the time, you prove that you are actually as great as you claim to be.

Sabriel is the female character we need to see more of in all genres. We need more competent, capable female characters who don't need constant saving, who don't constantly think about the set of hot abs beside them, who aren't completely clueless about their capabilities and skills. Who are the freaking heroes of their own freaking story.

So. Why the 3 stars? Well, how can I put it? The story itself is rather dull. Lacking in emotion. Kind of - distant? Sabriel is somewhat of a specter. It's difficult to sense what she's feeling - which is why when the romance emerged, I was rather astonished and didn't believe it. The way the story is written is quite perfunctory - decent for an adventure story, but the magic and the surroundings are rather sketchy and somewhat vague.

It's not that I didn't like this book; I did enjoy myself (particularly the end) and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone. It's just that it's not a book that swept me off my feet and made me fall head over heels in love. And that's perfectly fine - I'd rather read a "good" book than an "awful" book any day. And what truly saved this from mediocrity is the fact that Nix made Sabriel such an amazing character.

I have "Lirael", so I will be returning to this world; I am hoping that my second time around, I'll become more invested in the characters and the world.

Dialogue/Sexual Situations/Violence:

Nonexistent.

Sabriel overhears a sexual encounter in the next room of the hotel. Nothing explicit.

At times, this could be quite violent and gory - if not explicitly, then implicitly. Several background characters die, and Sabriel is not afraid to defend herself.

Mr. Nix has demonstrated truly excellent writing skills. His words flow smoothly, painting vivid pictures in the readers' minds. Each sentence is crafted with precision and care, making the story engaging and captivating.

On the other hand, Mr. Curry's narration is equally outstanding. His voice brings the story to life, adding an extra layer of depth and emotion. His intonation and pacing are perfect, keeping the listeners on the edge of their seats.

Together, Mr. Nix's writing and Mr. Curry's narration create a wonderful synergy. The combination of these two talents results in a truly remarkable piece of work that is sure to leave a lasting impression on anyone who experiences it.

1.5 I'm so sorry :(

I truly feel a great sense of sorrow. It weighs heavily on my heart. I understand that my actions or words might have caused some kind of pain or disappointment.

I want to express my deepest apologies. I wish there was a way to take back what happened and make things right.

Please know that I am sincere in my remorse. I will do my best to learn from this experience and ensure that it doesn't happen again in the future.

Once again, I'm extremely sorry for any inconvenience or hurt that I may have caused.

I read this entire story about Sabriel's journey, and to be honest, I couldn't tell you one thing about her, other than the fact that she is a necromancer of a sort, which is given in the synopsis.

This book does have a lot of things going for it. There's a fast-moving plot filled with imaginative magic, and the writing is really accessible. However, I'm shocked at how lacking the characters are. They are so flat, so devoid of any development, that it made it really hard for me to care about them or connect with them. This, in turn, led to me not caring about or connecting to the story as a whole.

Again, there are a lot of other great aspects to this book, which is why I'm rounding up. But the boring characters really bummed me out.

↠ 2.5 stars

Reviewed by Candace Cunard for TeensReadToo.com

The moment I completed reading this book, I was struck by the realization that I should have delved into it much earlier. For the past six or seven years, I had intended to read it but somehow never managed to get around to it, and that was indeed a misstep. In SABRIEL, Garth Nix presents the reader with a captivating fantasy world that springs to life through the actions of the eponymous character and others.

The Old Kingdom is a realm of magic, encompassing both Charter magic, utilized by those with a connection to the ancient Charter that bound magic for benevolent purposes, and Free Magic, the entities that escaped the binding and oppose the Charter. Free Magic is also exploited by necromancers who seek to defy the Charter by animating corpses. Only one individual, the Abhorsen, combines the use of Charter and Free Magic to return deceased spirits to their final repose and dead bodies to their graves. As the daughter of the Abhorsen and herself the Abhorsen-in-Waiting, Sabriel must learn to employ the Abhorsen's tools to venture into the realm of Death and bind destructive spirits to prevent them from causing harm to others.

However, the situation in the Old Kingdom is deteriorating rapidly, and as a consequence, Sabriel grows up in Ancelstierre, the southern neighbor of the Old Kingdom. She is close enough to the border to learn and practice Charter Magic, yet far enough away to be ignorant of the customs and traditions of her homeland. The story commences when eighteen-year-old Sabriel, on the verge of graduating from preparatory school in Ancelstierre, receives a messenger from her father, bearing the bells and sword of the Abhorsen, indicating that he is in peril and requires her assistance. Sabriel must cross into the Old Kingdom, a place she knows little about, and somehow find a way to rescue her father from whatever fate has befallen him before his spirit is drawn too deeply into Death. Along the way, she encounters a capricious magical spirit in the guise of a talking cat named Mogget, the traditional helper of a long line of Abhorsens, and a former Royal Guard named Touchstone who has been frozen in the form of a ship's figurehead for the past two hundred years. Together, Sabriel, Mogget, and Touchstone embark on a journey through the Old Kingdom as they uncover more about the necromancer who has attempted to kill Sabriel's father and who will unleash destruction upon the land on both sides of the border if they fail to stop him.

Nix's writing is concise and effortless to read,塑造出的 characters思维清晰，动机极具人性。Sabriel和Touchstone之间发展出的关系情感真挚且丰富，我很享受阅读他们之间的所有互动。甚至次要角色也刻画得细致入微，有自己独特的个性。Nix对魔法的概念也给我留下了深刻的印象，它比哈利·波特或无数其他类似故事中的那种指一下就施法的世界更深刻、更有质感（尽管这本书肯定会吸引前一类奇幻作品的粉丝）。在旧王国，施展魔法取决于对所需宪章标记的深入了解，而对于Sabriel来说，还取决于她对协助死灵法师行当的七个铃铛的掌握，这些铃铛有助于控制死者。这本书确实独具匠心——我以前从未见过类似的作品。

I so desperately wanted to fall head over heels in love with this book.

So many people whom I hold dear and love have this book as their absolute favorite, piece by piece. I truly yearned to experience the same intense affection for it.

However, to my disappointment, it just didn't happen. Make no mistake, it is indeed a good book. The writing is excellent, with great skill and finesse.

But alas, it is simply not the right fit for me. It's like a beautiful puzzle piece that doesn't quite match the picture I have in my mind.

Nevertheless, a detailed review will be coming soon, where I will attempt to dissect and analyze the various aspects of this book that may have contributed to my different perspective.

Perhaps others will find in it the magic and charm that I unfortunately missed. Only time will tell.

Truly good fantasy, for me, hinges on the world building. I would rank Garth Nix alongside Tolkien and Lewis when it comes to the epic imagination that went into creating the world of Sabriel.

In fantasies that embrace entire worlds, my favorite elements are those that we never truly learn about. I adore the ruins in Lord of the Rings, the barrows and the fallen statues of the old kings of Gondor. One of my favorite scenes in Lewis's wonderful Narnia books is the ruined city of Charn in The Magicians Nephew, a dying world whose history now lives only in the memory of its last evil queen.

The world Nix has crafted here is deeply immersed in "things that came before". The action alternates between the Old Kingdom, where magic flows and the dead walk, and Ancelstierre, where magic is supplanted by industrial age technology and rifles replace bespelled swords. These two worlds are separated by the Wall, a structure constructed eons ago by the Wallmakers, the creators and wielders of the Charter, the force that composes the entire world. It's a complex world, yet under Nix's highly capable hand, it feels entirely real and even natural.

The titular Sabriel is the only child of the Abhorsen, a Charter mage tasked with restraining and binding the dead who attempt to cross the gates of death and wreak havoc in the world of the living. The great charter stones that have always safeguarded the Old Kingdom are breaking, and the land is filled with the dead, whose power grows stronger now that no king or queen rules there. When her father becomes trapped in death, Sabriel must leave her home in Ancelstierre and take up his sword to rescue him and save the two kingdoms from the wrath of a living dead sorcerer.

The book is replete with lush, elaborate descriptions of the mysterious forgotten ruins of the Old Kingdom, such as tombs and empty cities destroyed by the rampant dead. Sabriel herself is a wonderfully vivid and fully developed character, full of life and strength, yet balanced with all the fears and insecurities of a typical 18-year-old.

The supporting characters, a mysterious cat creature named Mogget who serves the Abhorsen and the equally enigmatic Touchstone, a young man with a tragic past, are just as splendid and perfectly depicted as Sabriel.

This book is sheer pleasure, from the first lines of the opening chapters to the bleak and bloody battles of its final pages. While it's great fun to read (which I did several years ago), I cannot recommend highly enough the experience of listening to it read by the utterly brilliant Tim Curry. If there was a way to enhance these stories, it was having them narrated by this total master of theatre and film. Curry's voice is like liquid gold, and he endows every character with individual, vividly burning life. He effortlessly transitions from a gentle, slightly higher-pitched Sabriel to the gruffer, melancholy voice of Touchstone and then to the sardonic Mogget. Every battle and romantic moment is completely riveting. I literally couldn't wait to get in my car to listen to even just five minutes of his decadent tones weaving in and out of Nix's masterful narrative. If a voice could sound like the richest, darkest hot chocolate with just a hint of spice, it would sound like his.

Seriously, if you have any interest in audio books at all, check this out. It's worth it for Curry's performance alone.

I am not actually a fantasy reader, yet I finally decided to begin with a new fantasy series! It is SABRIEL!

Let's start with my favorite part, the artwork! Sabriel is truly a visual treat. The illustrations bring the story to life in the most vivid way. From Sabriel herself, with her determined look and unique style, to the various characters and settings, every image is captivating. The detailed depictions of the Old Kingdom, with its ancient architecture and mysterious atmosphere, add to the overall allure of the series.

Now comes the review. The story plot was extensively attractive and a page turner from the very first few chapters. Although the story went slow at times, with intense attention to every single detail, it was still thrilling. However, I was quite disappointed with the ending. It felt rushed and scrambled, as if the author was in a hurry to wrap things up. There were so many loose ends and unanswered questions. For example, where did Mogget disappear? Why wasn't Touchstone given the enough attention considering all the mysteriousness surrounding him? And why did Kerrigor/Rogir, who was built up as such a great evil of the death, just finish up in a few pages? These issues really detracted from the overall quality of the novel and left me feeling a bit unsatisfied.

One more thing that bothered me was the capitalization of some words that didn't seem to belong to the name of someone. It really disrupted the reading smooth flow and made me feel uncomfortable. I found myself constantly being distracted by these random capitalizations.

Nevertheless, I did enjoy reading Sabriel overall. Despite its flaws, the story had its moments of excitement and adventure. I believe I would give the rest of the trilogy a chance as I had already bought them. I didn't like the ending, yet I did like the epilogue as it was a trigger for the upcoming sequel, Lirael. I'm curious to see where the story will go from here and if the author will address some of the issues that I had with the first book.

WOW!!! I know I am ridiculously late to the party. But let me tell you, three words to sum this book up are Magical, Spellbinding and Astonishingly Good! (Okay, that's four but I really had to whittle the list down from twenty five!)

All I can say is Garth Nix can write, and I truly mean WRITE. He has this incredibly vivid imagination that seems to know no bounds. His way with words is beautiful, like a gentle breeze that caresses your soul. He crafts his story with so much love, care and precision that it's truly a work of art. A few of the comments on GR have mentioned his writing style, and yes, it is a little different to what I'm used to. But let me tell you, it is phenomenal nonetheless. I must thank my colleague from the bottom of my heart for introducing me to his work. It is incredibly powerful stuff!

Honestly, some of the descriptions in this book were jaw-droppingly good. I could list a few below, but the truth is the book is full of them. Just open the book on a random page and I'm sure there'll be a sentence worth savouring. His words are like Ambrosia, the food of the gods, delicious to drink and revel in. I could feel myself growing fat on them!

So, turning to the story itself now. Sabriel is about a girl who discovers that her father is Abhorsen (a title given to a Mage who prevents the Dead from rising again). Her father finds himself in some serious difficulty in Death (which is beautifully reimagined as a succession of gates. The creatures and free spirits who find themselves cast beyond the Ninth Gate are supposedly never to return to the living world again). Sabriel therefore undertakes a perilous journey from the living world in her home town of Ancelstierre, going beyond the wall into another realm of the Old Kingdom, ultimately into death to find her father and save him.

Nix's depictions of Death, the descriptions of the Mordicant, Thralk, Kerrigor, Mogget and Touchstone, the description of free magic, the realms of the living and the dead, and the use of charter marks throughout, make Sabriel one of the best and most riveting books I have ever read. (And I read quite a few amazing books last year). This is definitely a classic and will continue to be popular amongst the upcoming generations. It truly is one of a kind.

To say this is a children's book is narrow-minded. It is a beautiful, in-depth and enchanting read which demands the reader's upmost attention. In fact, I could happily dive into the book again and swim amongst Nix's words in a river of pure luxurious fantasy.

Nix is a master storyteller and having read Sabriel, I shall definitely be indulging in more works from the Old Kingdom! You should too!