For the New York Review of Books, Michael Chabon sympathizes with the challenges faced by the young adult writer and defends Philip Pullman’s offerings. Chabon argues that, despite Pullman’s attack on C.S. Lewis’ Narnia chronicles, Pullman’s His Dark Materials

ends not as a riposte to Lewis or a crushing indictment of authoritarian dogma but as an invocation of the glory, and a lamentation for the loss, which I fear is irrevocable, of the idea of childhood as an adventure, a strange zone of liberty, walled, perhaps, but with plenty of holes for snakes to get in.