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...
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...
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 ...