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osprey_archer) wrote2024-05-13 05:00 pm
osprey_archer) wrote2024-05-13 05:00 pm
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Book Review: Seaward
Both littlerhymes and I had read Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence before we embarked on our buddy read. Neither of us, however, had read Seaward, and it turns out to be a fantastic book for a buddy read, because it’s very odd. Mostly in a good way! I think I enjoyed it! But also I’ve had to sit with it for a week after reading it to decide, cautiously, that enjoyment is the right word for it.
In the first chapter of the book, we meet Westerly, who is traveling across a blighted landscape. He catches and eats a fish, then enchants the bones, which call out “in a thin high scream shrilling like a cicada,” which tells Westerly that he’s being followed and must hurry on.
Then, in the next chapter, we meet Cally, who is at home in our world. Her father is very sick, and is taken away to the seaside, and soon after her mother follows. Cally, left alone in her house, hears her mother singing, and the singing goes on and on and on, till Cally presses her hands to the mirror, and “the glass seemed to melt under her hands as if it were water, and took her in, and she stepped through the mirror, out of the room.”
In some ways this is going exactly where you think it’s going: yes, of course they’re going to meet, and yes, of course they’re going to fall in love. Otherwise, though, it’s a strange dreamlike book, a quest story in a way, because both characters are seeking the sea. But they don’t know quite why, or quite how to get there, and they drift through a strange dreamlike land where nothing is quite as it seems. Stones turn into people, people turn into stones, figures stand on the high hills and play chess with armies in the plains below, and one of these chess-players seems to be a friend and the other an enemy… but, all the same, at the end of the day, aren’t they both playing chess?
It’s an unusual book, full of lovely imagery; if you liked the bits I quoted, they are very characteristic of the book as a whole. Not quite like anything else I’ve ever read, and in some ways not wholly satisfying (I desperately wanted Cally to have at least one selkie swim before she decided not to join her selkie kin!), but a strange and wonderful experience nonetheless.
littlerhymes and I had read Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence before we embarked on our buddy read. Neither of us, however, had read Seaward, and it turns out to be a fantastic book for a buddy read, because it’s very odd. Mostly in a good way! I think I enjoyed it! But also I’ve had to sit with it for a week after reading it to decide, cautiously, that enjoyment is the right word for it. In the first chapter of the book, we meet Westerly, who is traveling across a blighted landscape. He catches and eats a fish, then enchants the bones, which call out “in a thin high scream shrilling like a cicada,” which tells Westerly that he’s being followed and must hurry on.
Then, in the next chapter, we meet Cally, who is at home in our world. Her father is very sick, and is taken away to the seaside, and soon after her mother follows. Cally, left alone in her house, hears her mother singing, and the singing goes on and on and on, till Cally presses her hands to the mirror, and “the glass seemed to melt under her hands as if it were water, and took her in, and she stepped through the mirror, out of the room.”
In some ways this is going exactly where you think it’s going: yes, of course they’re going to meet, and yes, of course they’re going to fall in love. Otherwise, though, it’s a strange dreamlike book, a quest story in a way, because both characters are seeking the sea. But they don’t know quite why, or quite how to get there, and they drift through a strange dreamlike land where nothing is quite as it seems. Stones turn into people, people turn into stones, figures stand on the high hills and play chess with armies in the plains below, and one of these chess-players seems to be a friend and the other an enemy… but, all the same, at the end of the day, aren’t they both playing chess?
It’s an unusual book, full of lovely imagery; if you liked the bits I quoted, they are very characteristic of the book as a whole. Not quite like anything else I’ve ever read, and in some ways not wholly satisfying (I desperately wanted Cally to have at least one selkie swim before she decided not to join her selkie kin!), but a strange and wonderful experience nonetheless.
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Have we ever talked about The Neverending Story by Michael Ende? I wonder if it has some of that dream quality. It's been a long time since I read it...
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Seaward and the Boggart are two very different flavours of Susan Cooper. Though she still likes making people forget things in both!