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Title: Seaward by Susan Cooper ISBN: 0-02-042190-7 Publisher: Simon Pulse Pub. Date: 30 April, 1987 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $4.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.79 (14 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Lovely
Comment: This book is one of the most beautiful love stories ever crafted. I think Susan Cooper is a genius of description and this story about two young people dealing with loss shows her skill admirably. West and Cally experience deep, true love being born in them out of trust and shared experience. This book has all the fantasy and detailed dreamlike settings you come to expect from Susan Cooper, and the only problem with this book is that the peripheral characters, even the main antagonists, are pale in comparison with Cally and West. S.C. has created such strong, rich, personalities for the two of them that the others can't match up. This fact, however, does not really detract from the book, because this really is a story of what happens inside West's and Cally's minds and hearts after their great losses. The other characters are there to personify traits and abstracts; good, evil, loyalty, etc. If you are looking for a smart, deep fantasy story with a dash of powerful romance thrown in (the description of West watching Cally wash her hair is one of the most heartstopping bits I've ever read), read Seaward. You won't be disappointed.
Rating: 5
Summary: This is my favourite
Comment: I am twenty-three years old, and I have loved this book since I was in my very early teens.
Susan Cooper is a classic children's author, and her Dark is Rising sequence regularly gets praised as her best, or at least most popular work.
This book, although very different from her previous and following works, blows even the best of that whole series away.
It is the journey of West and Cally, two teens both suffering from grief, through a strange country, where life and death are living beings. All they know is that they must travel to the sea; neither is entirely certain why. This journey allows both teens to come to terms with their own pain, and their different losses.
The landscape is strange and dreamlike; it is known from her comments in essays that Susan Cooper literally uses dreams to inspire scenes in her stories, and this story more than any other seems to me filled with that drifting feeling. The two main characters are well dsrawn, and some of the supporting cast are very memorable. It also makes excellent use of the selkies, a piece of old folklore of which I am particularly fond.
Best of all, Susan Cooper does NOT do here the thing which made Silver on the Tree such a huge disappointment to me; she does not cheat at the end.
(Warning for those who haven't read the book; spoiler ahead)
Where in Silver on the Tree, the characters risk life and limb in the ultimate battle, only to be made to forget all that they have accomplished through the whole Dark is Rising series (thus making the series itself pointless), in Seaward, the characters are made to forget - for a while only , with a promise that they will remember again when they need to. This ending satisfies, where the similar clossing to Silver on the Tree only disappoints.
(spoiler done)
There are some stories which stay in one's mind for one's lifetime. I knew the moment I was done this story that this would be one of those books. It was my favourite when I was younger, and now that I have met more grief of my own, it has become a much deeper part of me. I only wish it were a little better known behind her more popular works.
Rating: 5
Summary: I was never the same afterward.
Comment: I read this as a child, and it was one of three books that affected me the most out of all my excessive reading. (One of the others was Diane Duane's Deep Wizardry). It changed me with its beauty and poignancy.
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Title: The Dark Is Rising Sequence: Silver on the Tree/The Grey King/Greenwitch/The Dark Is Rising/Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper ISBN: 0020425651 Publisher: Simon Pulse Pub. Date: October, 1993 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Green Boy by Susan Cooper ISBN: 0689847602 Publisher: Aladdin Library Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $4.99 |
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Title: Dawn of Fear by Susan Cooper, Margery Gill ISBN: 0689713274 Publisher: Aladdin Library Pub. Date: 30 October, 1989 List Price(USD): $4.99 |
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Title: The Boggart by Susan Cooper ISBN: 0689801734 Publisher: Aladdin Library Pub. Date: 01 August, 1995 List Price(USD): $4.99 |
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Title: King of Shadows by Susan Cooper ISBN: 068984445X Publisher: Aladdin Library Pub. Date: 15 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $4.99 |
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