text: After reading the trilogy, I was left wondering what the hell happened? I have just read all 3 of the His Dark Materials trilogy and what was a strong start in book 1 and 2 is utterly demolished in this clunker.
     Pullman allowed his eagerness to bash religion to completely destroy an engaging story - one of the most creative stories I've come across in 20 years of reading fantasy. There isn't even a remote chance of a sequel to fix up this mess. If you look up `anticlimax' in the dictionary, you'll see a picture of this book. From first page to last, time is wasted on boring characters, while all the good ones are either killed off, or just MIA for the entire book. Spoilers ahead.
    What about Lyra and her parents? Somehow, she never knows what happened to them and after all she has been through is supposed to be content with going back to school like a good little girl? She never even confronts them to try and understand their motivations. And Will just goes back with Mary Malone to her apartment so they can figure out how to avoid the cops. Over a cup of tea, naturally. And that's it for him.
  In addition to all that, this book doesn't even seem to be connected to the first two. None of the characters resonate they way they used to and instead of being good friends, Will and Lyra fall in love and have sex at the tender age of 11 or 12 . . .  all in the last 30 pages. What happened to the story, for cripes sake?!  And what happened to the `temptation'? Was choosing not to stay with Will her way of not succumbing to it? The whole premise is just so lame to start out with. As an earlier reviewer pointed out all the windows that were opened for centuries didn't endanger the universe, why not leave one open for 60 or 70 years to give Lyra and Will a chance to know each other. The flimsy reasoning behind this is just as contrived as their sudden and immediate love for one another. Supposedly, they had more than gonads going for them, they survived death together!
    Pullman didn't feel like thinking it through, he just wanted a gut wrenching ending. In addition to that, he wanted to mock the reader by taunting us with the `reality' of knowing that nothing they did in the trilogy has any hope or meaning. All of Will and Lyra's efforts are futile, kind of like - guess what? religion for the rest of us morons. 
  
  After having the reader go through endless pages on the mulefa-elephant aliens or whatever, ultimately the characters the reader wants to know about disappear with barely a whimper. Iorek Byrnison, Lee Scoresby - instead we get page after page about Mary Malone the Disaffected former Nun. Pullman all but pants in his eagerness to give the finger to anyone of us who believes in Him or anything for that matter!
    This is NOT children's literature, it's a hate ridden manifesto that is more suitable for adults who at least have some way of maintaining some sort of perspective throughout this sloppy mess. It's totally dishonest to sell this as a children's book, or even as a competent work of fiction. All of the painstaking work of the first two books is undone with this one.
   
  We never get closure on Lyra's parents.
  We never really understand what Dust is and where it comes from.
  We never see Will reunited with his mother.
  We get a lame battle where `god' dies and no one even knows why or how.
  Lyra and Will fall in love, but have to `sacrifice' it so that all the windows to other worlds can be shut forever, with only flimsy reasoning behind it.
  The mulefa and Mary Malone's work together amounts to nothing, everyone just goes home. Presumably, Will goes home, although we never see it. All that yearning after his mother and so forth . . .nothing.
  The major enemies are killed off too easily - and what about Armageddon? What happened to the Fortress and all the rebel angels and . . .you get the idea. It all just sort of disovles.
  Mary forgot to be the Serpent, or else I missed that in one of the countless pages on the mulefa.
  
  Another reader pointed out:
  " Phillip Pullman could have written a masterpiece with this series. Instead, the story falls flat under the weight of the author's own agendas and mockeries. What a waste of time. I can't believe this book actually won awards. It stopped being thought-provoking and started being inane and silly."
  
   It would have been better if Lyra had just awakened one morning and it was all a dream. Instead, relearning how to read the alethiometer will somehow enable her to build the Kingdom of Heaven in the course of her lifetime. Absurd.
  This was one of the most disappointing and infuriating reads of my life.
  