After reading Clariel, I figured I was past this series. It was a fantastic troy, and I'm sure it holds up, but we didn't need to revisit it. Then I saw Goldenhand on the shelf at the library. 
 "eh, I should skip this; the previous one w so disappointing," I told myself. "but what's this about, anyway?" I opened the cover and began skimming the flyleaf. 
 The first word is Lirael. The book cane home with me. 
 I love our Second Assistant Librarian, and not gonna lie, my favorite parts of this book are when she returns to the glacier and is welcomed back into the library. "Librarian" is a huge part of her identity in her own book, but this time it's only important when she's there. 
 There's someone else hogging screen time in this book, too; a young woman who was meant to be sacrificed to Chlorr of the Mask, which explains why we got that whole origin story in the previous book. 
 I liked this because it had Lirael in it, and she is wonderful. The rest. ... I'm going to pretend that the Abhorsen trilogy is still a trilogy and that these newer additions to it aren't really part of the same story.