Maybe it was the audiobook format, but I found the story to be 'just ok'. Tim Curry was good as a reader, but the story itself didn't really grip me. ( )

2019 re-read:

This was a re-read for me, prompted by a group re-read. I had meant to get round to doing so as I now have some later volumes in the series that I haven't read at all, and needed to refresh my memory of the setup for the series.

Although I loved this when I read it some years ago and on that basis had awarded it a 5 star rating, the second time around it was a little disappointing. Perhaps it didn't help that I came to this direct from Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy. Obviously I didn't expect a YA novel to have such vividly realised characters, but I found those in Sabriel on this reading to be very lightly sketched and to be rather uninvolving in terms of their relationships.

I still loved the magical system with the originality of the necromancy/bells angle, and the descriptions of the various living dead creatures, the river of Death with its gates, and the strange and chancy being, Mogget, which is a white cat most of the time, were still fascinating and the best parts of the novel. The involvement of the army at the end, with its echoes of Jon Pertwee's Doctor Who and UNIT, was fun. But for me the book failed to make the relationships and characters concrete and believable, and I didn't find the 'romance' between Sabriel and one of her fellow travellers at all convincing; in fact, it seemed superfluous. So this time around, I am having to reduce my rating to 3 stars. ( )

Sabriel by Garth Nix.

The story follows Sabriel, a young girl who is thrust into a world of magic and necromancy. She is forced to accept a role that she is not yet ready for in order to find her father and save the Old Kingdom. ( )

A tale of a girl who has been in a boarding school beyond the wall, a girl just finishing her schooling when suddenly she is summoned to act as the Abhorsen, to lay the dead to rest as her father and many generations before him did. When she receives the sword and his necromantic bells she knows something is seriously up.

I loved this years ago and it fared well with a re-read. ( )

This was my first book by Garth Nix but the plot seemed quite interesting and the reviews overall didn't seem bad so I decided to check it out. While I wouldn't say that I loved it, it was interesting enough. At the beginning I was really worried I wouldn't like it at all because it was moving so slowly but then things began to pick up enough to keep me going.
Sabriel is named after its main character, who basically lives at a school which teaches some magic, among other things. She doesn't see her dad often, nor has she ever been on the other side of the wall into the Old Kingdom where he spends most of his time. The old kingdom is a dangerous place, especially for those not well experienced in the magic of charter mages. Sabriel's dad is also known as Abhorsen and his duty is to return the dead which have come back to the realm of the living back to where they belong. When Sabriel's dad turns up missing she begins her quest to find him; however, this quest soon becomes something much greater than a rescue mission. Now in the Old Kingdom, Sabriel meets several new characters and learns a lot of new information that changes her whole perspective on life, her role in it, and of The Abhorsen.
While the story did pick up a bit, it didn't by much for the rest of the book in my opinion. The descriptions and world building were great, and many of the ideas like the abhorsen, charter magic, the specific weapons used against the dead, the central enemy, and Sabriel's traveling companions were very intriguing...BUT, the characters themselves fell flat for me. None of the characters seemed to have much depth, they all seemed singularly driven by one task and they didn't seem to have too much of a personality outside of that.
Furthermore, I feel like had the concepts of the charter magic and the different creatures and such had been explained more than they were it would have helped. A lot of the time, something was mentioned and I was just like "ok, I have no clue what that is *waits to read more about it* .....ok, guess I'm not supposed to."
I am thinking of giving the second book a try because of how much potential I think the concepts have and because I really enjoyed the world in which Sabriel occurs. I just hope that in the next one, things are explained a bit more thoroughly and characters are more developed because those were the two main downfalls of Sabriel for me.
( )