Just So Stories

Penguin Australia

October 2025

• ISBN: 9780241458709
• Imprint: Penguin and David Fickling Books
• RRP: $34.99

It was a very long wait indeed and so many of us were very impatient indeed [no, it wasn’t just me!] – 2017 from the first to 2025 for the last. Not only did I revisit my reviews of #1 and #2 but I listened to both on audio – finishing just in time for this one to arrive.

It was a splendid birthday present really -perfect timing! It took me almost two weeks to read, which is a very long time for me. Most people know I read very quickly. But aside from the fact, that it was my birthday week(s) and things were busy, I was quite tired and it is an intense and complex read so about 50 pages a night was the average.

I’m not going to tell you anything about the plot beyond this.

Lyra and Pan have had difficulties for a long time, they feel disconnected and not just their ability to seperate. This is particularly so since Lyra has started university and read trendy authors with radical ideas.

But really it goes much deeper than that, and Pan knows it. He says that Lyra has lost all that made her so exceptional as a child. Her sense of wonder, her curiosity, her fearlessness, her moral convictions and, above all, her imagination. After witnessing a murder one night as he has slipped out of Lyra’s room (a risky business if anyone sees a dæmon sans person), a train of events follows that takes them both, along with Malcolm Polstead on seperate epic journeys.

Pan leaves Lyra to ‘find her imagination’.

Lyra leaves Oxford to find the rose field – AND Pan.

Malcolm, now working for Oakley St as well as being a college don, also heads East, mostly in search of Lyra. There are strange meetings and old connections along the way.

Mr Ionides is a superb character, with whom any reader will engage immmediately. Lyra has many revelations with which to contend, beginning with the part played in her rescue as a baby by Malcolm and Alice, to insights into her parents that had long been hidden.

Once again, the Magisterium is a threat to all, and anyone reading this might think that Pullman had anticipated current world events, but as we know those same events with their despicable actions, the fascist regimes, the genocides, the destruction of the free world are replays from history. However, it felt like quite horrifying parallels, and made me feel even more uneasy about the parlous times in which we are living. But I digress.

What I loved most about this marathon was the ‘back stories’ of characters and finding out more about Lyra’s world and the convolutions within it.

My one and only peeve [and this was also the opinion of a librarian friend who read it at the same time] was that the end was very ‘meh’ and didn’t really seem to be a satisfactory conclusion. To my mind there were still a lot of unresolved threads. I know it’s meant to be the final but it was almost like it was being left open for another.

Regardless of that, I still consider Pullman to be a great writer and the two Lyra trilogies to be exceptional. And speaking of exceptional, you might like to search out this gorgeous bind-up edition of His Dark Materials which I bought The Kid for Xmas (yes, I gave it to her already of course!).

It was one of her mum’s favourites and she loved the HBO adaptation. It truly is a thing of beauty. Why not buy BOTH and make someone’s Christmas truly special? (that of course could be yourself!). Even with the unsatisfactory ending I still give it a 5 rose 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹rating.