I quite enjoyed the Golden Compass movie and immediately ordered this boxed set of Lyra's adventures (the Golden Compass, the Subtle Knife, and the Amber Spyglass) from Amazon. It is being marketed as a Young Adult book, probably as a result of the main characters all being teenagers, but it certainly tackles more serious topics than, say, Harry Potter, and there are also a number of rather shocking plot developments.

When the Catholic League called for a boycott of the Golden Compass movie, they said it was less about the picture, but more about keeping children away from the books. And indeed, Pullman is quite aggressive in his attack on the concept of organised religion, to the point where one has to wonder if he is actively trying to offend.

Hardcore fans of the novels also disparaged the movie for watering down the controversial content to make it more commercially viable. I do not think that this actually happened, and the religious themes are not all that prominent until the later volumes anyway, but the movie does deviate from the source material in other ways, most notably in that it cuts off the ending (an anti-Happy-Ending if there ever was one) and reverses the order of the two main events before that. Apparently Pullman approved of these changes, though.