Book Review- Susan Cooper's "Over Sea, Under Stone"

So, this novel is the first of Ms Cooper's "The Dark is Rising Complete Sequence." I don't even like to call it a novel since it is so short and the end so blah. Let's refer to it as a novella section of a novella sequence, as it is the first of five parts totaling only about 1000 pages.

The story follows three children on a vacation with their parents and strange great uncle. While staying at a house the children find a "map" that is really just a strange puzzle drawing that leads to a grail of King Aurthur. The children, with a bit of help from their uncle, set out to follow the clues and find the missing grail. As it so happens, at the same time, there are "evil/bad" people also looking for the map and the grail it leads to. The story ends with the children finding the grail, but losing whatever secret the grail was holding in a very pathetic climax. With the secret lost the children turn over the grail to a local museum for a reward of 100 pounds.

In my opinion, not only is the story line quite boring, but there is no way it captivates the attention of its intended audience- children! It is poorly written, with vocabulary that is incorrectly used. For a Simon and Schuster publication, I am highly disappointed with my purchase and the amount of time I wasted trudging through this awful work. The details were obscure and hard to follow, and the characters lacked much depth. Point-of-view was switched so frequently it was hard to follow who was thinking what, which made all the characters blend together. The only interesting character in the story is Great Uncle Merry simply because there is such a shroud of mystery behind who he is. At the end, one of the children wonders if he is Aurthur's Merlin, but it is just a fleeting thought that isn't developed at all.

All that being said, I did spend $15 on the collection so I am going to continue with Ms Cooper's tale and hope that it gets better. My guess is that she put a lot of hints/foreshadowing into this first sequence that will be significant later on, but just lacked the talent to create an interesting start for what could be a good series (if the reviews on the cover mean anything). Though it's hard to say at this point that she will ever be on the level of Tolkein or C.S Lewis as is quoted by Psychology Today.

Love and Kisses-
KABO