Amber Spyglass: the award-winning, internationally bestselling, now full-colour illustrated edition: 3 (His Dark Materials)

A very fine edition of a great series.

I now have all three illustrated editions of this trilogy and unfortunately, compared to the the Harry Potter illustrated editions (illustrated by Jim Kay) these are lacking, particularly in the quality and feel of the illustrations themselves, it hardly feels like they're worth the purchase. Jim Kays work on the HP series is much better, a joy and wonder to look at, (Same with Alan Lee's work on LOTR) these on the other hand feel very flat, lack of detail - I understand that it's thematic and there is a quite a bit of darkness to be expressed in the illustrations but still, it could've been handled in a different manner, I just don't look forward to turning the page to find the illustrations. Also, there is simply isn't enough illustrations anyway, there are so many pages of plain text against white background.Also, the character, Will, is not portrayed against the character illustrated in the Knopf eds. which is quite jarring as that's the image of the character I've imagined since the early 2000's - they instead turn to the a likeness of the actor in the terrible BBC adaptation of the trilogy - which is odd, as the majority of the cast in that is completely off-beat anyway, assumingly used to pander to certain socio-political sects. Actually, the same applies to the illustrations of Lyra too...it all just feels flat...but this is the only option I have for an illustrated ed.

it was badly packed, just a thin envelope. It had obviously been dropped and one corner damaged. It wasn't bad enough to be worth returning it, but, considering the price, I would have hoped for a perfect copy!

Recieved the book with a ripped cover. This should have been checked. Now I have the hassle of returning it