5/19/2023 0 Comments The Grey King by Susan Cooper![]() ![]() ![]() Their lives are not the perfect, innocent world we often want them to be. But children understand darkness a lot more than many people give them credit for doing. I haven’t read these as a child, so I can’t speak to how I might like or dislike them. The previous volumes of this series lack that complexity and that depth of conflict required to sustain that interest. The best writers are those who can harness this predatory nature to craft stories that absorb the reader by tickling us with the hints and harsh edges of the darkness at the edge of the light. Their ability to ensnare and divert readers through twisting passages of description and narration make them far craftier and less trustworthy than their dramatic and poetic cousins novels aim to make a meal out of the reader. Yet in adjusting the tone of the books to aim them to her younger audience, Cooper also seems to feel it’s necessary to remove a great deal of the complexity and subtlety that makes novels such an interesting literary form. They’re brilliant examples of methodical mythological remixing. ![]() I have been rather disappointed with the novels as stories. ![]() It’s undeniably an important series in the fantasy canon, but my personal reaction to it has been more ambivalent. I’ve been making a slow tour through Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence for a few months now. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |