what I’ve been reading lately:

Cooper ties everything up neatly, but in a way that’s satisfying, that isn’t too neat or totally predictable. She also nicely shifts the focus, at the end, to humanism: a world that’s determined less by fate than by choice, and somehow manages to make this ring true, despite the fact that the rest of the…

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Welsh place-names, lessons in pronunciation, hills and lakes and grey mist. This book felt less sinister than some of the others in this series, perhaps because it’s more about preparation than open conflict between the Dark and Light, perhaps because there is more of High Magic in it, perhaps because the Grey King and his…

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This book was written nearly a decade before the first manned space flight, three years before Sputnik was launched, at a time when space must have captured kids’ imaginations in a somewhat different way than it does now. The sense of possibility that fills this book makes it a pleasure to read, as do all…

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Wonderfully fast-paced and filled with plot twists, from curses to potions to romantic entanglements.

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Back to Trewissick, to fish and the sea, history & tradition. In this book, Jane made me think of Chihiro in Spirited Away—both girls know to treat things-of-magic with kindness as well as respect, and it’s somehow really pleasing to watch a character engage with the world that way.

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I liked this book for all the echoes of superstition and tradition and history: the way it’s set in the time from Midwinter’s Eve to Twelfth Night, the idea of the past being so very present, the way that Will and Merry and the Old Ones can travel through time and step outside it.

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I read this book (and the rest of Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence) as a child, but I didn’t remember anything about the plot: not the English-ness of them, not the Arthurian context, nothing, in fact, aside from a few lines of poetry from one of the later books. Re-reading Over Sea, Under Stone,…

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