So I get this "new for you" email from Amazon...a new His Dark Materials book and about plotzed. Only to discover its the original UK title. C'mon Amazon, get it together...I get enough garbage in my email.

This entire series is intellectually challenging, yet ethically very disturbing. Any youngster below the age of 12 or 13 needs an adult grounded in his or her own philosophy/theology of life with whom to discuss it. There are many frightening situations that can be wonderful grounds for discussion of good, evil,and the gray in between. However,left to their own devices, highly impressionable and imaginative children who are reading beyond their years might find much to persuade them in these books that few adults, even especially those closest to them, are to be trusted, and that life on this lonely planet is the end of the road. Whether this is the parental view or not, no child who hasn't developed the capacity to make a sharp differentiation between fact and fiction should be left to wonder alone. Read it WITH your child, if indeed they tend to read above grade level and get really "into" what they read.