The daemons ruined me as a kid and quietly put me back together as an adult. In Lyra's world, all people are born with a companion called a daemon - a creature that changes shape in its youth but eventually settles on one solid animal form once their owners reach adulthood. An old sailor tells Lyra his daemon settled as a dolphin, meaning he can never live away from the sea. That idea, that growing up is your soul picking one shape and closing every other door behind it, has never left me.

What I didn't clock as a ten year old, and what wrecks me now, is the severing. The severing of the daemons was just too personal and emotional. At Bolvangar the Church straps children down and cuts them from their daemons, and separation from the daemon is painful and potentially deadly, leaving the severed person more zombie than human. It's the settling nightmare run backwards, the most personal horror I've read in a book for children.

Then there's Lee Scoresby. The most touching character for me was Lee Scoresby, a rough around the edges Texan. The jackrabbit daemon of the Texan tells us that he is always aware and able to move instantly, despite his slow drawl and easy nature, the two of them bickering like an old married couple. Lee Scoresby's death broke my heart. I put the book down and sat there a while, and the reason you feel so utterly gutted whenever one of these creatures dies, is because you know what it feels like.

The theology I swallowed whole as a kid and side eye now, right up to the literal war on Heaven. And the Authority himself, God, is this brittle: God is a senile old man, and the end of the Authority (literally just blown away) lands with a whimper. This supposedly cosmic, superpowered force is repeatedly said to be too weak to truly combat humans; hell, Balthamos spends his last appearance literally running away from a dude with a gun. Somehow that lands heavier than any showdown, and I loved the daemons, LOVED LOVED LOVED the melancholy lover angel Balthamos, grieving his Baruch.

I first read these around ten, exactly the age the books are secretly about. Read this as a kid and re-read as an adult, and found it had been about me all along. The depth of which Pullman's book explores all of these above issues makes this trilogy for adults as much as it is for children. Few books grow up alongside you like this one, and it stays with you long after you are finished reading.