The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper

Book Two. Title book of the "sequence." New children, rather new child - although there had to be quite a crowd of children because the child, Will Stanton, is the seventh son of a seventh son. This fact is not immediately apparent because, for one thing, Cooper never gets around to actually counting the offspring - and secondly because the first son of the seventh son died in infancy and is never mentioned in the family.

Is the eleventh birthday something significant in British folk whatever? It seems to come up regularly. Harry Potter, for example, is carried off from the dreadful Dursleys on his eleventh birthday. In this case, on his eleventh birthday (on Midwinter day) Will comes into his mythic inheritance. He is revealed as the last born of the Old Ones, some of whom, like Merriman Lyon (Gumerry of Book 1) have been around for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Will's coming of age launches an epic battle between good and evil - all of which takes place between the winter solstice and Old Christmas (January 6). Of course, a great deal of the action takes place outside time, so the usual constraints did not apply.

It was really pretty good. The fact that I have been reading epic fantasy for so many years is probably a handicap. This volume was even blurbed in comparison to Narnia and MiddleEarth - although the Tolkien connection escapes me. This owes far more to the tradition and mythology of the British Isles than Narnia does. I think that one of its problems is that it does not seem to be written to its apparent target audience. It is listed as "age 8 and up," but the writing and the themes are a bit beyond eight year olds of my acquaintance and even a stretch for most twelve year olds.

Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper

First volume of an apparently very well-known series of children's books. It is British and is vaguely reminiscent of the Narnia books. Three children, rather than four, removed from their usual setting to a mysterious old house in Cornwall. While exploring the house, they discover a map, not a doorway to another universe. The setting here is Arthurian legend rather than Christian allegory, and the Arthurian aspect is rather lightly addressed.

The children are much in the company of their odd, but beloved, Great Uncle Merry, also known as Gumerry (wasn't it a Shoes book by Noel Streatfield where the child or children had a Great Uncle Matthew known as Gum?). Gumerry sets them off on a quest to follow the treasure map (of course, it is a treasure map) to find an Arthurian artifact lost for 900 years. There are evil villains and rotten people and at the end we are left to wonder who Gumerry is really - a question which will doubtless be addressed in the remaining four books in the "sequence" (not series). A minor curiosity is that the series is known by the title of the second book, not the first.

It is quite well done, and I had never heard of it until I found all five volumes in a box of my younger daughter's books. The mystery left to me is why a look up of Susan Cooper referred me to Diana Wynne Jones, whose books aforementioned daughter did insist that I read.

A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny

This time we have an imported murder victim, who totally deserves to be made dead, an excellent choice. No further inroads are made on the population of the village in this one. Actually, a villager and another person die in the course of things, but it could have been worse.

Again, we have causal madness and general grimness. We have a potentially fatal situation for Inspector Gamache and his faithful sidekick, Beauvoir. A new twist is that a double agent has been placed on Gamache's team to help destroy him - for some long past and somewhat incomprehensible sin against the Surete. This story line is left unresolved as a hook.

There is something odd about the way that Penny uses dogs in her stories. Unravelling that will probably require reading more of these books - and possibly reviewing a couple of things from the first books. It is interesting that immediately after an unnecessary discussion of how people put down their aging and infirm pets there is a conversation between the Superintendent in Montreal and his agent on Gamache's team. It was all vaguely reminiscent of the foreshadowing of the ending of Of Mice and Men in the scene where they shoot Candy's dog. Less subtle, but still suggestive.

Still Life by Louise Penny

A friend recommended these - at least I think she did. The author's name is different, but the town and its general location are the same. I will check with her next time I see her. From her description, I expected a quintessential "cozy" mystery; she kept telling me how "sweet" they were. I did not find this sweet, although it is set in a tiny village (ala Miss Marple). The tiny village is somewhere not very near Montreal, and if she bases an entire series of murders in this village, it will soon be a ghost town. I suppose fictional villages are flexible. They are close enough to Montreal that the detective sent out to investigate is a Chief Inspector of the Surete, not a little old lady with her knitting.

I enjoyed it - enough to read the next one (probably even before I go back to the cookie mysteries - definitely cozy). Maybe my friend didn't read this particular one. I went back and got the first one. She said something about deserving murder victims - and this one was definitely not deserving. We also had insanity, gratuitous cruelty, homophobia, and an incompetent police officer who is fired by the Inspector. There wasn't a great deal of action - but I did love the scene where the murderer has another victim tied up in the basement and two policemen (including the inspector) and her husband come to the rescue and fall down the stairs, which the murderer has rigged to explain the fatal "accident."

Death Before Compline by Sharan Newman

I had been thinking about rereading the early books in the Catharine DeVendeur series and when someone asked me about getting books for my Kindle, Newman's name came to mind. Most of the books in the series are not available for Kindle, but this one was available - it is a collection of short stories featuring the characters and setting of the series - and even includes recipes! In Newman's notes she makes a joke of the recipes, which were requested when the stories were commissioned for themed collections. She asks that the reader be aware that recipes were not common in the twelfth century - except for cleaning compounds and poisons, which she did not feel were exactly appropriate. So she came up with some recipes which she has tested in her own kitchen and which she feels are reasonably faithful to the methods and ingredients of the period.

The stories cover a wide time range - from Catharine's early period at the Paraclete to adulthood, and a couple of them feature her Jewish cousin, Solomon.

Good fun.

Postcards from No-Man's Land by Aidan Chambers

This was an easier read than I expected, to the point where I kept wondering if it was actually designed to be YA. So I checked out the Wiki on the author, and found that it is indeed written for Young Adults (read "teenagers").

I did expect (based on the title) a story about the war. It really isn't, although one of the story lines takes place during a specific allied action in the Netherlands, the war is never the focus of the story. The author describes some of the action and talks about the Year of Hunger which followed the Allied liberation of the country, but it seems somehow remote even from the direct narrative in the period.

It is fundamentally a romance. Two women love the same man, Sarah, the pregnant wife back home in England, the other, Geertrui, the Dutch girl who nurses him in hiding during the campaign. The author does have a problem - he has to get the man well enough to impregnate the Dutch girl - but he still has to kill him, because they can't both have him. As a character, the war-era Jacob is functionally voiceless. The two women are the characters. Sarah we know through her grandson, Jacob, who is sent to attend the anniversary memorial to the liberators of the Netherlands. Geertrui actually tells most of her own story in first person. I do think Jacob's heart attack was a bit cheesy, not to mention the opportune return of Geertrui's old boyfriend - and his willingness to marry her and raise her child as his own.

The writer seems to carefully raise "issues" to titilate the youthful reader, such as assisted suicide (legal in the Netherlands) and the relaxed attitude toward homosexuality there, particularly in Amsterdam, and for modern-era Jacob to deal with. He does steer clear of the legal prostitution. Although, actually, young Jacob never really deals with them - he is simply exposed to them.

To summarize, I found it somewhat unsatisfying - perhaps because it was quite predictable - or because it softened all the edges so much. I have to read a "grown-up" book or two next.

An Exchange of Gifts by Anne McCaffrey

My day for Annes, I guess. Found this one in the same box as the previous one. This Anne, however, really is Anne McCaffrey.

Basic fairy tale: runaway princess meets runaway prince and they eventually fall in love all while incognito. The "gifts" are the fantasy twist in this one. The princess's gift is a green thumb, and she has run away because it is deemed unsuitable for a princess - oh, yes, and because she is about to be forced to marry a rotten old baron. The prince's gift is the ability to cast a "glamour" and cause people to see what he wants them to see, and he has run away because he has been beaten for refusing to use his gift to trick our very own runaway of the first part into marrying the evil baron.

I'm guessing the story is primarily a vehicle for the illustrator, whose work in this context I found disappointing. All pages had wide, drawn borders resembling woodcuts - and they were all the same and not particularly illustrative of the story. There were also a very few (three, I think) full page illustrations also in the woodcut mode, which were supposed to represent scenes from the story - and didn't. McCaffrey is one of the best at word images and it was unclear to me that the illustrator had read the story. Of course, without those page borders, the book barely would qualify as a short story.