The Grey King, and a bonus

By -
The Grey King, by Susan Cooper

Somebody read Susan Cooper's Grey King for the Welsh reading event, and I realized I hadn't read it The Dark is Rising for years.  I re-read it nearly every Christmas, but the others tend to get much less attention lately.  The Grey King did, after all, win the Newbery Award, so I figured this would be a good time to re-read it.  It's the fourth book in the Dark is Rising sequence -- and as I recall, the last one is really quite strange.

Will has been very ill indeed, and has actually forgotten his special knowledge, but he's sent to a family friend's farm in Wales to recuperate.  This places him exactly where he needs to be in order to fulfill the next step in his quest, which is to find a golden harp and awake the Six Sleepers.  He meets Bran, an unusual boy who could be an ally or an enemy, and Caradog Pritchard, a neighboring farmer and definitely an enemy.  Dogs are also everywhere in this story!  Will and Bran go through ordeals in order to win the harp, and waking the Sleepers is not easy.  

"The Grey King" is a strong personage of the Dark, and lives on Cader Idris, the Welsh mountain.  I had to look up the geography, which Cooper has fooled with a bit.  Cader Idris (more commonly called Cadair Idris, evidently) is a huge rocky peak in the Snowdonia National Park.  Cooper populates it with nearby sheep farms and, I think, moves the lake Tal y Llyn a bit.

Cadair Idris


Cader Idris also features in the third book of the Chronicles of Kazam by Jasper Fforde -- The Eye of Zoltar.  I got it through Interlibrary Loan and had a great time reading it!  Jennifer and her co-worker Perkins head out to the wilds of the Cambrian Empire (approximately the western half of Wales) to search for the Eye -- they need it to save their dragon friends.  Gathering a guide and some terrible companions, they venture into the incredible dangers of Cambria, an adventure that comes with a guaranteed fifty-percent survival rate.

But get this -- the story ends on a cliffhanger!  Fforde had jolly well better write some more Kazam adventures soon!


Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more