Reply #52: I'm an Episcopalian, and I've just recently started reading The Golden Compass

[Lydia Leftcoast]

I'm to the point where Lyra is en route to the North on the ship.

It's been on my "to read" list ever since I saw how popular the series is in England, and as luck would have it, somebody left a copy at my local coffee shop's "book exchange" shelf.

So far, I don't see what the moaning and groaning by conservative religious types is all about. It's a fantasy novel, and a very creative and well-written one.

The world portrayed in it is fully imagined, but not described in exhaustive detail. You just get little hints that its history diverged from real history at some unspecified point in time, leading to interesting differences, such as Dutch settlers in England's fens or North America being the land of the Skraelings (Leif Ericsson's word for Native Americans).