A border, guarded by soldiers from both realms, separates the two kingdoms. She lives in a world where realistic early 20th century Great Britain co-exists with the ?Old Kingdom?, a place of magic, sorcery and fear of the undead. Sabriel is the daughter of the Abhorsen, a high necromancer whose main duty is to reverse the ills done by evil necromancers that are hell-bent on raising the dead and letting them rule the earth. Tim Curry's audiobook performance, which is a touch campfire tale and a touch Shakespearean theatre, fits the tone delightfully. For my money, The Golden Compass was more interesting, but readers looking for a work like it, albeit with a more traditional sensibility, would probably enjoy Sabriel. There's nothing I'd consider prurient or inappropriate for the average 12-13 year old, though. The writing resembles Pullman's The Golden Compass in that it takes its dark reality seriously and contains a few 'adult' things, such as some glancing references to sex and several grim scenes of death. I also enjoyed the side characters, a sardonic, semi-helpful creature of unclear origins named Mogget, who is trapped inside a cat's body, and a stolid, brooding young man named Touchstone, who is wrapped up in his own past. Many of Nix's ideas, from the militarized zone between Ancelstierre and the Old Kingdom, to the different bells that perform different kinds of necromantic magic, to the beautifully eerie World of the Dead, a Stygian realm populated by beings and souls that have not yet passed entirely from life (and a third parallel reality in the story), have a delicious sense of old history to them. While the quest that ensues follows a well-worn good-versus-darkness script, I enjoyed its world creation.

Meanwhile, the undead ghouls and spirits that plague that region have been acting up, for reasons that Sabriel doesn't understand, having been away from home for so long. The story begins with its heroine, who is completing a clandestine education in magic, learning that her often-absent father, who spends most of his time in the Old Kingdom, has gone missing.

However, Sabriel has spent most of her life in Ancelstierre, a non-magical country that resembles Britain of the early 1900s, but shares a strange border region with the Old Kingdom. The heroine of the title is a girl of mysterious origins who was born in the magical 'Old Kingdom' and possesses a rare natural gift for necromancy. If you're in the mood for a somber, gorgeously visual novel that's part Philip Pullman, part Tolkien, and part a world out of one those artful fantasy illustrations that seemed to have had a heyday in the 1970s, Sabriel might fit the bill.

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