His Dark Materials
The man should have stopped with the first book, or, if he really needed the money: the second.
Without giving any spoilers here are, briefly, three reasons I dislike the third book…
- The primary characters stop being interesting in all the ways that mattered to me. Lyra, in particular goes from being a self-sufficient sometimes trouble-maker to a whinny little kid who can’t quite managed to do anything her own. My girlfriend pointed out that Lyra barely manages to finish a single sentence during the course of the entire third book. Not so good for the driving force behind the series.
- The secondary characters don’t affect the plot at all. Why exactly have characters who’s stories you could chop out completely and never notice?
- I would say that no less than five times the author makes up literally random new rules for the universe. He uses these new rules solely to put the characters into, or take them out of, some jam or another. His fictional world was solid before — why deliberately introduce holes?
Maybe its not his fault. Occasionally, its no doubt editors who let popular authors get away with savage murder.
He did, much to his credit, create a great world and good characters in the first book — if you can read just that one without getting sucked in: its worth it.