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A tale of dark secrets, deep love, and dangerous magic! Since childhood, Sabriel has lived outside the walls of the Old Kingdom, away from the random power of Free Magic, and away from the Dead who refuse to stay dead. But now her father, the Charter-Mage Abhorsen, is missing, and to find him Sabriel must cross back into that world. With Mogget, whose feline form hides a powerful, perhaps malevolent spirit, and Touchstone, a young Charter Mage, Sabriel travels deep into the Old Kingdom. show more There she confronts an evil that threatens much more than her life--and comes face-to-face with her own hidden destiny. show less

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electronicmemory Both books have beautifully written prose, elegantly sketched worlds, and stories that stay with you long after you've finished. Two young protagonists must face overwhelming dark forces as they struggle with isolation from their peers and allies.
140
cmbohn Features a strong female protagonist, some creepy characters, and great combat.
30
ed.pendragon Both titles involve musical instruments (cwidder in one, bells in the other) which have extraordinary magical powers in the correct hands.
20
sandstone78 The roles of Chrestomanci and Abhorsen are similar- magicians who police the use of magic. Both books feature their protagonists growing into these roles.
20
amaranthe Abhorsen and The Rifter are both unique and distinctive stories, but they are also similar enough in tone and in certain other elements that people who like one may well enjoy the other. The Rifter is a little more obviously aimed at adults.
humouress A young girl carries the burden of her father’s heritage and has to venture into lands beyond the boundaries of reality - which also happen to be her homelands
Corinne-pixel Kind-hearted protagonist on a quest with unlikely companions

Member Reviews

349 reviews
Buddy read with Nana!!

OH MY GOSH

Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?

The Writing and Worldbuilding

I adore Garth Nix's writing. It's lyrical without distracting from the narrative and flows very well. He clearly has a very strong grasp on the language. I absolutely loved every bit of it. I have to admit that I thought this wouldn't be nearly as good as it was, because it came out before I was born and often older (and tbh even current) YA writing lacks strong narrative voice and relies heavily on tropes and cliches to convey the story. But this was totally unique and excellent in every way! I can even see the influence it has had on the genre, with books like Shadow and Bone and Throne of Glass clearly trying to show more emulate what this book had (though their success varied).

I AM IN LOVE with this world and its inhabitants. From the very beginning, this gave me White Walker and the Wall vibes from Game of Thrones and that's always been my favorite part of the show. The world was so intricate and amazing. Every element of this world was masterfully explained without being too vague or too obvious. The prologue gave me LIFE and started the story off strong. There was a part around 25% through that dragged just a little, but it ended quickly and gave way to a tight narrative with lots of adventure and action with some of the best themes ever.

The Characters

Sabrina the teenage witch:
Death and what came after death was no great mystery to Sabriel. She just wished it was.
OH MY GOODNESS WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN???? Everyone can stop trying now, we have had the perfect strong female character for well over a decade now. Sabriel's an actual human being who second guesses herself and gets too proud sometimes and is polite to ghosts and inanimate objects but is also willing to do what it takes to do what's right, and is a little too rash sometimes but makes up for it by trying to plan ahead when she can. She's tough and disciplined and has a heart of gold. TL;DR she's real and I appreciated that beyond measure.

Salem the sassy cat familiar:
"You may call me Mogget. As to what I am, I was once many things, but now I am only several."
This sassy demon cat was honestly the most iconic thing I've ever had the intense pleasure of reading. He's mysterious and otherworldly but is also a fluffy white cat, so what more could I ask for?

Pinocchio:
"I love you," he whispered. "I hope you don't mind."
While we never know his real name, Touchstone was definitely an excellent addition to the main cast. He was a great guy with a mysterious past that continues to haunt him even after being rescued from his two-century long sleep as a wooden statue by Sabriel. He's kind and caring but perhaps a tad unhinged in battle. I absolutely loved him.

Abhorsen: (aka Sabriel's dad)
"Let this be my final lesson. Everyone and everything has a time to die."
He wasn't really there most of the time, instead acting as the MacGuffin for most of the story. He was an effective MacGuffin, though, because I really did want him to be found. Sabriel's father was a great man with a lot of presence in the narrative despite his lack of physical presence. You can see a lot of his influence in Sabriel.

Conclusion

I thoroughly enjoyed it and will without a doubt be reading the rest of the series! I'm so excited to explore more of this world.

Five Great Charters knit the land
Together linked, hand in hand
One in the people who wear the crown
Two in the folk who keep the Dead down
Three and Five became stone and mortar
Four sees all in frozen water.
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Very fun book! Sabriel is a nice character to spend time with as she has a bit of a coming of age over the course of the novel while also fighting the dead and trying to pull off a rescue mission. The worldbuilding is interesting, and I enjoyed how Nix described Sabriel's bells. And I really appreciated the subtle romance between Sabriel and Touchstone, which was there but never took time away from the main adventure. Tim Curry's narration is delightful.
Sabriel was the first fantasy novel I ever read, and even now, over a decade later, it is still my favorite. In this book and its trilogy Garth Nix has written some of my favorite characters (Mogget!) and created a wonderful and rich world. His awe-inspring descriptions of some of the places in the Old Kingdom (and beyond?) stay with me to this day.

I strongly recommend this book to fantasy-lovers, young-adult readers, and (especially!) to young women for the fantastic portrayal of a young woman who puts evil back in its place (not because she is a woman, or in spite of it, but just because she's a strong and amazing person). This was also the first novel I ever read with a strong female protagonist, and I remember being so excited and show more happy about *finally* reading a book about a girl! Who's tough! Like me! That was a wonderful feeling. show less
Sabriel is the daughter of the necromancer Abhorsen, grown up cloistered away at boarding school in Ancelstierre, to the south of the Old Kingdom. When her father goes missing and a messenger arrives with his magical implements, she knows something terrible has happened and sets out to find him. But the road north is filled with dangers, one more terrifying than the other, but fortunately Sabriel manages to make some friends along the way. Will she be able to locate her father and defeat the evil that's coming to engulf both the Old Kingdom and Ancelstierre?

I'm constantly amazed by the quality of the literature that young adults can draw on these days, and this book, the first in a fantasy series about necromancy, is no exception. Like show more many other YA heroes and heroines of YA novels, Sabriel is thrown from a sheltered life headlong into her destiny and danger, completely unprepared for the difficult tasks ahead, and she has to learn how to deal with the undead quickly and grow up fast. The action resembles a rollercoaster: relentless pace followed by short periods of breathing space and some light relief provided by Mogget, a Free Magic being bound in the form of a cat, before the action hurtles along once again at break-neck speed. This is dark fantasy at its best, and the undead are suitably creepy and definitely not suitable for younger readers. I loved the imagery of the seven bells the Abhorsen wields to control and banish the Dead, and the river symbolising death rushing through the Nine Gates. And how cool is the role reversal, a young woman for once being the action hero and getting to rescue the prince?

The book was originally published in 1995, and I wouldn't be surprised if J.K. Rowling and G.R.R. Martin took inspiration from it (the Battle of Hogwarts and eternal winter north of the Wall, with the dead refusing to stay dead).

Even though the ending doesn't exactly constitute a cliff-hanger, it's clear that the story continues, and I'm glad I've already got Lariel, the sequel, lined up.
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A young woman finds herself thrust into a task that she feels unprepared for, and of course you have to hope that, despite the odds, she succeeds. This being fantasy, first cousin to fairytales and heir to human dreams, you can be almost certain that she will. But, to quote the song, it's not what you do but the way that you do it: that's what gets results... And because Garth Nix is a talented writer, with a long track record in publishing and editing, the end result is a very distinguished and impressive first volume in The Old Kingdom series. (In some countries the trilogy is named the Abhorsen series, from the title of the gatekeeper between the realms of the living and the dead.)

Nix, an Australian author, seems to have used show more Scotland and the North of England as his inspiration for the trilogy, though it's a Britain very different from anything we're now familiar with, not least because technology and attitudes correspond more closely to the early decades of the twentieth century. The Old Kingdom, at present without a king, is a realm where magic is so prevalent that the boundaries between Death and Life are easily crossed by adepts. It most resembles Scotland in being a land where kilts are not unknown, lying to the north of an edifice corresponding to Hadrian's Wall which divides it off from a rather unmagical Ancelstierre. But you will look in vain to identify equivalents in Scotland for features in the Old Kingdom, though the royal city shares some similarities with Edinburgh (as well as medieval Byzantium).

There are even two types of magic: Charter Magic, the purer form, and Free Magic, much harder to govern. I very much liked Nix's treatment of things magical, and while the rationale behind it (Where does it come from? Why is it strong in the Old Kingdom?) is rather vague in this story, its manifestation and all its detailing (Charter Marks, the taste of Free Magic) is well imagined and described. As a musician I was entranced by his wonderful concept of the sounds of bells precipitating magical effects, and I felt that each of Sabriel's seven bells was imbued with its own character to match its effects. In vain did I try to link them to systems in other cultures, though the ancient idea of the Music of the Spheres came close.

Some readers have complained about the rather perfunctory love story in this young adult novel, but I thought that the balance between this and the fantasy elements was about right. In any case, as the plot driver is mostly about the relationship between Sabriel and her endangered father, any overloading of romantic elements would have distracted from the parent-child bond that Sabriel concentrates on.

The sheer inventiveness that Nix displays is very impressive: I particularly liked the paperwings, gliders that respond to Charter Magic; gliders were of course still a relative novelty in our equivalent early 20th century culture. Other commonplace elements, such as the dead being reanimated, are treated in a way that feel fresh, for all our modern familiarity with zombies and their ilk. One of his wonderful conceptions is Mogget, a snow-white cat who is not what he seems, and who functions rather like a Cheshire Cat to Sabriel's Alice role. The touches of sly humour that Mogget provides helps to leaven the sheer and sustained dread that confronts Sabriel throughout the novel and which continues virtually to the very end of the tale.

There are also the wordplays that wordsmiths like Nix like to employ, wordplays such as Kerrigor, the name of the character who has precipitated the crisis and who perhaps derives his name from a medieval Arthurian poem. In this Welsh poem reference is made to an Otherworld castle called Caer Rigor, the Royal Fort, and which itself perhaps contains a pun on Latin rigor, 'harshness' or 'severity'. Another series of allusions concerns the holders of the post of Abhorsen, whose names end in -el, such as Sabriel, Terciel, Lirael and Clariel. This is surely a nod towards the names of the Biblical archangels, such as Michael and Raphael, the suffix of which means 'power' or 'divinity' and which is cognate with elohim, one of the Hebrew names for gods or God. Sabriel and her fellow Abhorsens are like those mighty powers who guard the boundary between this world and the next, comparable to the unnamed angel who stops Adam and Eve returning to Eden or to Michael who defeats the armies of Satan. Sabriel is perhaps the Hebrew sabra or prickly pear, tough on the outside but soft inside, both a young girl on the cusp of womanhood and a guardian angel.

Like many a good tale Sabriel works on different levels: a solid narrative to appeal to a first reading, and layers of allusion and echoes of other narratives, especially apt in a plot involving bells, to add to the joy of subsequent re-readings.

http://calmgrove.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/sabriel/
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Sabriel, daughter of famed Necromancer Abhorsen, is recalled to her magical homeland in the Old Kingdom to save her father. Notably darker than most YA fantasies, Nix’s protagonist Sabriel lives on the mundane side of the Wall as a school girl until she receives a sending from her father that anoints her the new Abhorsen, one who bind the dead to death. Sabriel is a rather sober, deliberate character, but her connection to death is reason enough for an unaccessible emotional connection. The palpable fear and uncertainty from the protagonist, however, draws you into the plot; a complex, linear thriller that gives very little away as it winds through Sabriel’s dark adventures.
A strong sense of familial duty, responsibility, show more education, and coming-of-age runs through the plot. The setting is a rich medieval throwback, crossing from modern convenience on one side of the dividing Wall to a darker, fantastical land riddled with dark creatures and magic. Death weighs heavily over the text, a grotesque, action-packed exploration that makes this novel unsuitable for anyone under thirteen.
Nix’s style is engaging, but the high fantasy world loses half a star for unexplained mysteries and motivations of the characters and setting.
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½
It took me a little bit to get into the story and be able to visualize the setting and magic in my head which I'd been tripping over, causing me to be pulled out of the story. Once I felt comfortable with it, the story really pulled me in.

I felt I could understand Sabriel's emotions as she went through her journey. Her naivete added to the thrill and danger she faced, rather than becoming an annoyance at a heroine who didn't understand what she was getting into. Her brief understanding of the world of the Old Kingdom allowed the reader to become acquainted with the setting as Sabriel, herself, did which went smoothly and kept the flow of the story moving swiftly forward. There were lighthearted moments to balance out the dark, and a show more brief glimpse of first love through Sabriel's inexperienced eyes to remind the reader that she was, after all, an 18 year old girl and not as stone cold as perhaps she thought she ought to be.

Overall I was completely enthralled with the adventures she faced and the characters who faced it with her.
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Author Information

Picture of author.
Author
120+ Works 72,598 Members
Garth Nix was born in Melbourne, Australia on July 19, 1963. He graduated from the University of Canberra in 1986 and worked various jobs within the publishing industry until 1994. After a stint in public relations, he returned to books and took up writing as a career. He is the author of Blood Ties, Clariel, Newt's Emerald, the Old Kingdom show more series, The Seventh Tower series, and The Keys to the Kingdom series. In 1999, he received a Golden Duck Award for Australian Contribution to Children's Science Fiction. To Hold the Bridge was named Best Collection by the 2015 Aurealis Awards. His novella, By Frogsled and Lizardback to Outcast Venusian Lepers, was named Best Science Fiction Novella by the 2015 Aurealis Awards. In 2018, he won the 2017 Aurealis Award for the Best science-fiction short story. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Some Editions

Curry, Tim (Narrator)
Dillon, Diane (Cover artist)
Dillon, Leo (Cover artist)
Feberwee, Erica (Translator)
Kattelus, Kaisa (Translator)
Raos, Predrag (Translator)
Reece, Gavin (Illustrator)

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Belongs to Publisher Series

Work Relationships

Common Knowledge

Canonical title*
Sabriël
Original title
Sabriel
Original publication date
1995
People/Characters
Abhorsen; Miss Greenwood (Magistrix of Wyverley College); Horyse (Colonel); Kerrigor; Mogget; Sabriel (show all 8); Terciel (Sabriel's Father); Touchstone
Important places
Ancelstierre; Old Kingdom; Abhorsen's House; Belisaere; Death
Dedication
To my family and friends.
First words
It was little more than three miles from the Wall into the Old Kingdom, but that was enough.
Quotations
Sabriel digested this in silence, staring at the swirls of fish and sauce on her plate, silver scales and red tomato blurring into a pattern of swords and fire. The table blurred too, and the room beyond, and she felt herself... (show all) reaching for the border with Death. But try as she might, she couldn’t cross it. She sensed it, but there was no way to cross, in either direction – Abhorsen’s House was too well protected. But she did feel something at the border. Inimical things lurked there, waiting for her to cross, but there was also the faintest thread of something familiar, like the scent of a woman’s perfume after she has left the room, or the waft of a particular pipe tobacco around a corner. Sabriel focused on it and threw herself once more at the barrier that separated her from Death. -- p.73
The marks became silver blades as they left her hand, mind and voice, flashing through the air swifter than any thrown dagger. -- p. 107
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)"Yes," said Sabriel, with some surprise. "I am."
Blurbers
Pullman, Philip; Alexander, Lloyd
Original language
English
Canonical DDC/MDS
823.914
Canonical LCC
PZ7.N647
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.

Classifications

Genres
Fantasy, Fiction and Literature, Teen, Young Adult
DDC/MDS
823.914Literature & rhetoricEnglish & Old English literaturesEnglish fiction1900-1901-19991945-1999
LCC
PZ7 .N647Language and LiteratureFiction and juvenile belles lettresFiction and juvenile belles lettresJuvenile belles lettres
BISAC

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