This book was the most boring thing I have ever read! It was worse than reading an autobiography by William Shatner! Molly was the whiniest, most complaining and ungrateful character I have ever had to read about. And don’t you even get me started on how biased she was about Americans! Not to men...
His name is West. Her name is Cally. They speak different languages and come from different countries thousands of miles apart, but they do not know that. What they do know are the tragedies that took their parents, then wrenched the two of them out of reality, into a strange and perilous world t...
Right after I finished Over Sea, Under Stone, I jumped into this second installment. I liked this one much more than the previous one, even though Cooper kept her writing style and ideas untouched: the incredibly well built suspense scenes, the darker tone spread all over the story. The introduct...
This was a disappointing end to a disappointing series. "It's all too... vague," says Jane at one point, at the start of yet another random adventure, a sentiment that unfortunately applies to the whole of The Dark Is Rising sequence.I don't even know where to begin, so I'll start with the same c...
Michael Morpurgo had once described Susan Cooper as "a storyteller of immense power". Only after reading one of her books, the 'King of Shadows', for myself that I can fully appreciate Morpurgo's approbation. There is one particular scene in one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies, 'Julius Caesar...
I’ve been making a slow tour through Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence for a few months now. It’s undeniably an important series in the fantasy canon, but my personal reaction to it has been more ambivalent. I have been rather disappointed with the novels as stories. They’re brilliant ex...
Re-read June 2013I'm noticing this time around how clever Cooper is to show these events through the Drews' eyes, rather than Will's. The second book was of Will discovering and growing into his power; now we see him fully grown, as it were, relaxed and confident in his role as Old One, and the D...
Only a child can find the way to bring Saint George back to the play. The Boy works for the Magician, and he wants more than anything to learn magic. But the Magician always says, "Not yet, Boy. Not till the time is right." So the Boy has to be content with polishing the Magician's wand, takin...
On their idyllic Bahamian island, Trey's little brother, Lou, is different -- he doesn't speak and he suffers frightening seizures. But when he and Trey find themselves mysteriously transported to Pangaia, an alternative universe where pollution and over-development have all but destroyed nature,...
Susan Cooper always writes well. This is one of her deceptively simple books. On the face of it the story is an uncomplicated children's story, but it is, as the title suggests, about learning what fear really is. For Derek and his friends, Peter and Geoffrey, think the war is, as Derek's father ...
He was sitting in the railway station cafe in the town of Fort William, having called in at the station to pick up a new timetable. When he was not away chasing a story he drove to Fort William once a week, in his elderly but reliable little van, to pick up any extra supplies his wife needed for ...
He was cross. Nobody, not even his friends, really seemed to believe that he hadn’t done it. They believed he hadn’t intended to, but like Coach Bonhomme, they couldn’t get past the evidence of their own eyes. Or in his parents’ case, the evidence of so many other eyes. “Never mind,” they said fo...
He was flotsam; he needed someone to provide a fixed mark which he could grasp as he was washed by. Other people had roots. He needed a refuge until he had time to think. The mechanical fury had begun to ebb away, leaving him aimless and disturbed. As he drove through the ...