This book and this series is exceptional in so many ways. I give it five stars, and my 9-year-old son is reading the series as I re-read it with him.Here are three things I love about this book:1- The main character is a strong girl (Lyra) with incredible willpower as well as a pre-ordained important role to play in the world. She is funny, scrappy, and a very likable and relatable main character. The fate of the world is literally in her hands, but she doesn't realize that.2- The world building here is so creative and so different from other fantasy novels. After reading a lot of fantasy novels with my son, at some point I get bored of the traditional storyline of wizard fights some sort of evil and prevails. In this world, every person is born joined to a Daemon, which is an animal who talks and basically always stays within ten feet of the person. They are bonded forever, and part of being a whole human is being bonded from birth to death with this talking animal. There's also a huge theme here about physics, which they call "Dark Matter" or "Dust" - that creates mystery that keeps you on the edge of your seat throughout the book. There are also such creative creatures, including armored polar bears who talk and are mercenaries for hire. There are witches, who live for thousands of years and exist within clans. And the Daemons are fascinating. They can change shape at will into any animal basically until their human hits puberty, at which point they pick one animal shape to maintain for the rest of their lives.3- The settings are interesting, and also related to parts of the earth. For instance, the story starts in Oxford in England where Lyra grows up as a part of a college. She is a little girl among scholars, who mainly runs around and does what she wants throughout the town. She's proud of her mastery of the spaces around her, and becomes the center of most groups of kids, who follow her - from her best friend who is the son of a kitchen worker at the college to her friends the Gyptians who live on boats. Then the story moves to the Arctic, where there are detailed descriptions of auroras and vivid explanations of the cold. My son got more interested in the Arctic here, and found himself exploring the science in the science fiction. That's an exciting advantage of a book like this!Notes for parents raising kids in a religious tradition:The church is evil in this book and in this series. And the church uses names and terms like many real religious traditions- clergy, magisterium, priests, etc. The church is funding an evil plot to try to harness energy by physically harming children in the Arctic. Phillip Pullman is unapologetic about the church being evil in this series, and even extrapolates later in the second book to make statements about churches always being on the wrong side of things.The book is just so, so good, so I didn't want that to be a reason not to share it with my son who loves fantasy and science fiction. But I did want to read it with him and talk about it throughout the book. We talked about how worlds are different from each other in fantasy and real life. We've also spent time talking about how church is an institution, and institutions make mistakes and have done things that are wrong or even evil- and how to square that with being confirmed in a church literally this year.If you are a parent of a child being raised in a religious tradition, I strongly recommend reading this series together with your child.