This book really should have been exciting but I actually would have had a much better time had I just blared Monster Mash from my stereo and danced around like a zombie with chicken skin pasted to my face.


Jedi knight of the living dead!

I feel like this was probably really cool in the 90's and if I had read it then, as my pre-Harry Potter 10 year old self. I probably would have loved it. But now, my brain has descended into different forms of oblivion and I laugh voraciously at danger.


Ha-ha-haaaaa!

Ah shiznit - I just used a Disney movie to demonstrate how "grown up" I am. Not to mention, I said shiznit.

I'm going to give you my (bored face) half-hearted summary because the story is way to convoluted to go into much depth without lulling myself into a coma.

Sabriel is told from the third person perspective of a young girl, named Sabriel (what a co-inky-dink), a necromancer whose father disappears into the realm of the dead. She tasks herself with going to retrieve him because she believes he's still alive. Blah, blah. Monster, monster. Magic, magic.

Our heroine, Sabriel, who I probably would have thought was the kiss-ass queen of kick-ass when i was younger, seems to know exactly what to do all the time without any internal dialogue, insight, or even advice. Not to mention - training! How did she know all this stuff? Because she was destined to become the Abhorsen? Maybe that would have worked for me when I was young, naive and believed that I was going to marry Han Solo. But now, I need to see the character work and earn the right to their abilities. I need to see them struggle and angst over it like young Harry.



The overall tone of the book was chilling. And I think if I was younger, I would have been thrilled and frightened during this book but now it just didn't phase me. I wasn't even all that interested. I just felt kinda 'meh' about the whole thing.

Action scenes abound in the book; however, every single one felt completely contrived and many were repetitive. Sabriel meandered about with unclear goals and even more unclear talents. It wasn't easy to distinguish her allies from her enemies but I didn't get the impression that this was done out of poetic symbolism, merely from indistinct plotlines and story progression. I wasn't captivated by much of anything in this book. Although, I did like the cat, Mogget.

Oh, and I'm saying its slow even though I was listening to it in audio. Usually I can tolerate slower books in audio form but this one really left a lot to be desired.

The narrator was very good at distinct voices for each character but some of them, namely the monsters, were unbearable, with gasping and hissing and gurgling. He also has a teensy bit of a pretentious tone, which is understandable since he is the illustrious Tim Curry of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But sometimes, it became annoying.

The writing was good. The world-building was good. The narration was good but I never felt invested. I wasn't blown away or engaged in the story or characters. I was majorly bored. And it was loooooong.

The scale of the book is huge, though. If you love sweeping epic fantasies that offer destiny as a solution to every problem with nothing to back it up (which, let's face it, is alot of fantasy), then you'd probably love this.

I really do think that this would be great for a younger audience. I think it was good, just absolutely wrong for me at this age. And if I'm being completely honest, I would much rather do the Monster Mash 100 times than go through this again.