Sabriel

This is my second time reading Sabriel and honestly, I had to do it because I remember loving it and not much else. The beginning I had, the way Sabriel and Touchstone meet and that's about it. So one day at work I decided to listen to the audiobook and that was that.

Sabriel is a girl sent to a boarding school for girls. And she doesn't hate it! Hear me out, she is actually having a pretty good time living there and it's not about her being horribly mistreated. So why is she there? Because her dad is in an other country, one that is medieval and magical as opposed to the “real” world that already has black and white movies and tanks and such. Said dad is also the person tasked with making the creatures coming back from Death go back and leave the living alone.
Then one day his tools (a sword and a set of magical bells) get delivered to Sabriel, who needs to go to that other country to find her dad and to save the world, as it is inevitable. She is joined by a chaotic magical creature in the shape of a talking cat and a young man who was turned into a statue 200 years ago.

Generally I'm not too much into books about teenage girls. I was one at one point and I much prefer both my child and adult life, so that already is kind of difficult. Sabriel is cool though. She is fairly serious, not very emotional, she is special without being an invincible perfect little angel and very very important to me, she doesn't need to put others down to be cool. Often times I feel YA authors fall into the same mistake teenage girls do as well; having to compare the girl to everyone else to make her seem awesome, instead of doing well because it's in her and that's what she does for herself. It's either other girls or the men and boys around her, but someone needs to be the enemy who is the root of all her problems, because god help us, she is just naturally perfect otherwise. Sabriel is an integral part of her word, though instead of being above everyone.
She is also not defined by being a girl mistreated by men. Another issue I often have. We can have many interesting things going on with a female character other than going the cliche, cheap way of “men hate her, therefore she is suffering”. Okay? Show something new. Another point for this book, Sabriel does many things and she is regarded as a person and not Princess Oppressed.

The way it's written makes me feel like this book is much older and stands apart from its own genre in the best way possible. The ideas are great, the magic is fascinating. There is plenty of action and even a twist here or there, but the book itself stays actually very well-written. The prose is the kind I like, not too emotional and really fits the mood of the whole story.

The only thing I don't like that much is the end. After facing off the Big Bad of the book we get no explanations and no way to know how the characters are going to be after it. It was just sudden, which is especially sad because the protagonist of the second book is NOT Sabriel, but a whole new girl. This is not enough to make me rate the book any worse than I already did, but that's something you need to know. It's about the journey and the destination is just... functional. You don't get big emotional moments at the end, you just hope shit went as well as you want it to be for these people. (They get mentioned in book 2, so we get that, but t the same time you have to fill in between those points.)

I do recommend.