TDiR Readalong: Over Sea Under Stone, Chapters 2-3
In Chapters 2 and 3 of Over Sea Under Stone, the Drew children go exploring and find their MacGuffin! Simon says some racist stuff along the way. Meanwhile, their parents lead normal lives and Great-Uncle Merry is mysterious. Intrigued? Then it's time to read The Dark is Rising sequence!
Apologies for the lack of specific discussion questions this time. I spent Thanksgiving at home allergic to stuff, so my body still feels a bit out of wack. If you have some of your own, though, please fire away. Or just ask me my opinions about stuff so far, I don't care.
Onward!
Chapter 2 opens with everyone at the breakfast table, and Great-Uncle Merry has returned to the Drews. Cooper describes his voice as booming enough to make ornaments rattle on the mantlepiece, and I can't help but think of Ian McKellan as Gandalf. While everyone else seems pretty content to keep their conversations with Merriman ordinary, Barney resists his British socialization and will have none of that shit:
The weather, he said to himself in exasperation, all of them talking about the weather, when Great-Uncle Merry's just come back from his quest.
I love this. I love that Barney's automatic assumption is for something fantastical. And considering that the Drews have a policy of not asking Merriman any probing questions, as it says in the very beginning of the chapter, one wonders if the other family members, even the Drew parents, may entertain these thoughts about Merriman from time to time. What's nice, though, is that on some level they acknowledge they're leaving things unsaid. It's not simply pretending everything's okay--when Barney asks if Merriman found what he was looking for, Merriman says not this time. Though, then he immediately changes the subject. So yeah.
With the rain rolling in, the kids have to spend their first day of vacation in the house. Cooper knows exactly how much of a bummer this is in real life. I like how Jane looks at the bookshelf and finds absolutely nothing of interest. As someone who's been in rental beach houses with nothing but cheap romance novels and thrillers, I totally relate.
Eventually the children decide--you guessed it!--they're going to explore the house. What's funny about this is we learn about Simon's love for imperialistic explorer types, which Barney and Jane are... less that excited about.
"That was Drake's ship. When he sailed to America and discovered potatoes."
"That was Raleigh."
"Oh well," said Barney, who didn't really care.
"What useless things they discovered," said Simon, "I shouldn't have bothered about vegetables, I should have come back loaded with diamonds and dubloons and pearls."
First of all, Simon, DON'T KNOCK POTATOES. They make so many good things! And then, shortly after, Simon goes on a rather racist narrative about running into some natives who will worship him as a god. As the book was published in 1965, it's... sort of part of the time period? Sort of. Actually, one of the interesting things about the Dark is Rising Sequence to me is that it's written in this turning point, when Britain's empire's been falling apart since the end of WW2. The kids have been raised with the tropes of imperial explorers, but they're not really questioning them yet? Yet, Jane and Barney think Simon is being kind of ridiculous with their explorer act until he can get their imaginations working.
I feel like later books in the sequence, even if it's just subtextually, address the question of how the world changes for Britain now that they no longer have an empire. Yet, I think this is one of those cases when I'm getting ahead of myself. So, I'll shush. But if anything occurs to y'all, let me know.
I love that the kids carry their lunch around the house in Simon's knapsack. It's a good touch that shows Cooper knows exactly how kids think, because I definitely remember doing similar stuff on rainy days. (I remember setting up the tent in the basement, because I couldn't do it outside.) And anyone else think that the lunch Mrs. Palk gives them sounds super delicious? Where on earth does she get saffron so cheap?
Their house has lots of corridors and twists and turns and things, and I am jealous. I always longed for very eccentric vacation houses as a child.
Love this little bit of description, and then laughed at the ensuing dialogue:
The little corridor, like all the house, had a smell of furniture polish and age and the sea; and yet nothing like these things really but just the smell of strangeness.
"Hey," said Simon as Barney reached for the door. "I'm the captain, I go first. There might be cannibals."
"Cannibals!" said Barney with scorn, but let Simon open the door.
BARNEY HAS NO USE FOR YOUR IMPERIALIST RHETORIC, SIMON.
Seriously though, I imagine Christmas dinners getting rather awkward in the future as Simon unthinkingly makes some un-PC remark while Barney pulls out his art school, liberal education and lays on the smackdown for Why Simon Is Wrong.
Hard as I am on Simon, his bossiness is... accurate? for those of us who are older siblings. I spent a lot of time with my brother and cousins going OKAY, WE DO IT THIS WAY in various imagining games. My games just tended to involve Robin Hood instead of cannibals.
I do love how Jane incorporates her practical suggestions into the game when she can, like, oh, maybe we don't need the telescope because we've got landmarks to navigate by instead? I can easily see her as a kindergarten teacher someday.
They poke around in the rooms a bit, and eventually notice that the walls for Simon and Barney's room don't match up with the room's interior. Of course, this means a secret passage behind the wardrobe. Which leads me to a little bit of an outburst...
I AM SO JEALOUS OF THESE DAMN KIDS. REALLY, I AM.
It's not that I don't think they should find a secret passage, because I seriously relish any instance where kids in the book I'm reading get to go into a secret passage. I lived for that stuff when I read Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins and the like. And yet, it was also one of those things where I'd get insanely jealous of the characters I was reading. Because, as a kid, I wanted nothing more than to find a secret passage in some house, any house. Every new house I was in, I went around tapping the walls to see if it sounded hollow. It'd be an extra bonus, I thought, if it was a secret passage used on the Underground Railroad. Of course, when you grow up in suburban subdivisions, houses don't tend to have such things.
In books, secret passages are a dime a dozen. Real life, stop ripping me off. I hope I'm not the only one who spent my childhood like this, at least?
Anyway, would the Drew children leave this passage unexplored? HELL TO THE NO.
Down into the attic we go! Cooper treats us to a delightful assortment of old objects in the storage space. Though, as someone with a dust allergy, the description does make me feel just a but sneezy. The kids decide to eat lunch down there, and there's some more cringey racism and some sexism from Simon as Jane calls them on being dirty. Shut up, Simon, you ARE covered in dust. I'm still jealous of the kids for getting to have a picnic in a secret passage, though.
We get some more insight into Jane as she gazes on the objects around her:
It was like reading the story of somebody's life, Jane thought, as she gazed at the tiny matchstick masts of the sailing ship, motionless forever in the green glass bottle. All of these things had been used once, had been part of every day in the house below. Someone had slept in the bed, anxiously awaited the minutes on the clock, pounced joyfully on each magazine as it arrived. But all these people were long dead, or gone away, and now the oddments of their lives were piled up here, forgotten. She found herself feeling rather sad.
In the midst of children exploring and pretending and just being kids, I like that Cooper pauses her story and allows Jane to introspect like this--to briefly touch on death and loss, even. Jane's character has a touch of melancholy, and that's okay. Cooper doesn't really try to force her into cheerfulness or innocence. I also like that we get further evidence of her empathy here. Though sometimes I wish she'd be a little more selfish. Ah well, all in good time.
In less melancholy news, this is the second time Simon's used the word "swizz" and I can't help but giggle at it. WTF does swizz even mean.
Barney tosses an apple core away, and the kids get worked up about rats. It starts as them all trying to wind each other up, and then they ALL start believing their own rhetoric. Anyway, it's enough that Barney is inspired to go retrieve the apple core, which leads us to...
PLOT POINT MACGUFFIN OBJECT.
Yes! Barney pulls out a roll of paper from the hole where he threw the apple core, and after the kids stare at it some while eating they discover that IT IS A SPECIAL DOCUMENT WHICH IS ALSO A MAP.
And then I die of jealousy some more. Because yeah, it's not like I expected life to work like books as a child, it's just that I took books as an example of how life SHOULD work, and there was a distinct lack of special documents which were also maps in my life.
This was also a moment where I paused and noted the old-fashioned pacing of the book. I feel like if this were a story I were writing, nowadays, my teachers and mentors would have insisted I introduce the map right away, or at least spend more time with establishing character moments in the first paragraph. Or maybe include a prequel, back in time, with someone throwing the map down the hole. Anyway, with the pacing nowadays, this is the sort of thing editors would want you to herald within the first few pages. I don't begrudge Cooper her own pacing choices, since literary conventions were a bit different fifty years ago, but it is something that jumped out at me. It's also something that would need to be addressed in a modern adaptation of the work, whether film or TV.
While the kids stare at the map, hoping to decipher it, Jane is the first to note that it's probably written in Latin. Obligatory moment of me going HECK YEAH LATIN SHOUT-OUT. Anyway, it leads to another Jane Character Moment which I found interesting:
"Well, Simon does Latin."
"Yes, come on, Simon, let's translate it," Jane said maliciously. At school she had not yet begun Latin, but he had been learning it for two years, and was rather superior about the fact.
"I don't think it's Latin at all," said Simon rebelliously. He peered at the manuscript again. "The writing's so odd, the letters all look the same. Like a lot of straight lines all in a row. The light in here isn't very good either."
"You're just making excuses."
"No, I'm not, it's jolly difficult."
"Well, if you can't even recognize Latin when you see it you can't be nearly as good as you make out."
Before now, Jane's either been sympathetic to others, or fussy--but fussy with a side of sympathy. This moment strikes me because it's probably the first time she's been outright negative and even a bit selfish. I think it's a good kind of selfish, in the end, because what I see here is a jealousy towards Simon for being further ahead of her in his studies. And of course being of jealous of that suggests she has an intellectual curiosity about Latin and is impatient to learn it. Of course, maybe I'm reading too far into things, but I think it's one of those negative character moments which tells us interesting things about the character.
Anyway, we do get the slightest inkling here that Jane isn't the wallflower she seems, and that she sometimes does resent her position as a Middle Child Between Two Strong Personalities.
Simon does a bit of decoding of the map (I agree, Latin manuscripts by dim light are difficult, and I have an MA in the subject!) and eventually deduces that the map belonged to a King Mark and a King Arthur. Of course he forgets the dative case as a possibility for their names. Whatever the case--no pun intended--Barney's Arthurian fanboyism switches on and he's suddenly SUPER EXCITED about this map. Because obviously it involves King Arthur, duh. Oh Barney, ILU. Jane, of course, tries to bring up practical concerns about the map, and maybe they should tell someone, but the boys are like PFFFF and overrule her. At that point, they notice it's getting close to dinner, and climb out of the hole, covered in dust.
Cooper treats us to more descriptions of Mrs. Palk's apple tart as the family has an awkward, slightly bickery dinner, and Merriman mysteriously broods. I swear, the food in this book. Also, I like that the bickering seems subdued and realistic, without getting too contrived. The Drews decide they need an after dinner walk, but, surprise! Some neighbors--the Witherses of the EVIL YACHT--have come by for a visit.
The Witherses are pleasant and tidy and polite and a bit too posh inviting the Drews to come out on their yacht, which of course means SOMETHING WEIRD BRO is up with them. Jane is the only one who senses it, of course. No one should be that tidy. I find it interesting that the Witherses tidiness is contrasted with the messiness of the children after they find the treasure map, though I'm unsure if Susan Cooper is trying to say too much there. Maybe that a little dirt never hurt anyone. Who knows?
Also, I just watched The Hound of the Baskervilles with Jeremy Brett, but I still feel like the Witherses should not remind me of the Stapletons. So please tell me to stop.
Alternately, they're also a bit camp, so I guess they could be Team Rocket, too.
The Witherses knowingly ask if the children explored and found anything, and Simon is inclined to lie. Anyway, Simon and Barney get their parents to give in and let them go on the EVIL YACHT the next day, but Jane feels like staying home. She convinces herself, after a while, that her intuitions are a little weird, and mostly attributes it to her fear of seasickness. Meanwhile I just want to hug her and give her tea like, JANE, IT'S OKAY, YOUR FEELINGS ARE VALID TOO.
At the very end of the chapter, Merriman is gone again. Fortunately, Cooper doesn't expect us to be surprised about it, just curious.
Overall thoughts on Chapters 2 and 3:
-We do get clearer pictures of each child, here. Simon is the take-charge one, or the bossy one, depending on the given moment in the text. Barney's the imaginative, faithful one, who can very definitely believe in what he imagines. While Simon imagines more out loud, I find it questionable that he's as connected to stories and the like as Barney. Jane's a bit harder to pin down, still, but hopefully we've managed to tease out a few threads of her personality.
-Merriman takes more of a back seat in these two chapters, which can be frustrating as you know he's out doing stuff, but I'm glad we got to know the kids a bit better.
-It's amazing how pervasive the sea is in these books. I'm so used to British things being set in London that I can forget how important the sea is to British culture.
-We've got the Withers set up as potential antagonists. It's interesting to me how much Cooper relies on intuition in her stories. In modern fantasy/sci-fi, intuition is almost entirely discounted as a Thing. I feel like authors only give their characters Bad Feelings about another character if they're to be disproven later on, which is weird because intuition CAN be helpful IRL. But Cooper... well, she'll use intuition a lot. Yet, I also find it interesting that Jane talks her way out of her intuitions, half the time something fantasy characters of previous eras don't do as much.
Apologies for the lack of specific discussion questions this time. I spent Thanksgiving at home allergic to stuff, so my body still feels a bit out of wack. If you have some of your own, though, please fire away. Or just ask me my opinions about stuff so far, I don't care.
Onward!
Chapter 2 opens with everyone at the breakfast table, and Great-Uncle Merry has returned to the Drews. Cooper describes his voice as booming enough to make ornaments rattle on the mantlepiece, and I can't help but think of Ian McKellan as Gandalf. While everyone else seems pretty content to keep their conversations with Merriman ordinary, Barney resists his British socialization and will have none of that shit:
The weather, he said to himself in exasperation, all of them talking about the weather, when Great-Uncle Merry's just come back from his quest.
I love this. I love that Barney's automatic assumption is for something fantastical. And considering that the Drews have a policy of not asking Merriman any probing questions, as it says in the very beginning of the chapter, one wonders if the other family members, even the Drew parents, may entertain these thoughts about Merriman from time to time. What's nice, though, is that on some level they acknowledge they're leaving things unsaid. It's not simply pretending everything's okay--when Barney asks if Merriman found what he was looking for, Merriman says not this time. Though, then he immediately changes the subject. So yeah.
With the rain rolling in, the kids have to spend their first day of vacation in the house. Cooper knows exactly how much of a bummer this is in real life. I like how Jane looks at the bookshelf and finds absolutely nothing of interest. As someone who's been in rental beach houses with nothing but cheap romance novels and thrillers, I totally relate.
Eventually the children decide--you guessed it!--they're going to explore the house. What's funny about this is we learn about Simon's love for imperialistic explorer types, which Barney and Jane are... less that excited about.
"That was Drake's ship. When he sailed to America and discovered potatoes."
"That was Raleigh."
"Oh well," said Barney, who didn't really care.
"What useless things they discovered," said Simon, "I shouldn't have bothered about vegetables, I should have come back loaded with diamonds and dubloons and pearls."
First of all, Simon, DON'T KNOCK POTATOES. They make so many good things! And then, shortly after, Simon goes on a rather racist narrative about running into some natives who will worship him as a god. As the book was published in 1965, it's... sort of part of the time period? Sort of. Actually, one of the interesting things about the Dark is Rising Sequence to me is that it's written in this turning point, when Britain's empire's been falling apart since the end of WW2. The kids have been raised with the tropes of imperial explorers, but they're not really questioning them yet? Yet, Jane and Barney think Simon is being kind of ridiculous with their explorer act until he can get their imaginations working.
I feel like later books in the sequence, even if it's just subtextually, address the question of how the world changes for Britain now that they no longer have an empire. Yet, I think this is one of those cases when I'm getting ahead of myself. So, I'll shush. But if anything occurs to y'all, let me know.
I love that the kids carry their lunch around the house in Simon's knapsack. It's a good touch that shows Cooper knows exactly how kids think, because I definitely remember doing similar stuff on rainy days. (I remember setting up the tent in the basement, because I couldn't do it outside.) And anyone else think that the lunch Mrs. Palk gives them sounds super delicious? Where on earth does she get saffron so cheap?
Their house has lots of corridors and twists and turns and things, and I am jealous. I always longed for very eccentric vacation houses as a child.
Love this little bit of description, and then laughed at the ensuing dialogue:
The little corridor, like all the house, had a smell of furniture polish and age and the sea; and yet nothing like these things really but just the smell of strangeness.
"Hey," said Simon as Barney reached for the door. "I'm the captain, I go first. There might be cannibals."
"Cannibals!" said Barney with scorn, but let Simon open the door.
BARNEY HAS NO USE FOR YOUR IMPERIALIST RHETORIC, SIMON.
Seriously though, I imagine Christmas dinners getting rather awkward in the future as Simon unthinkingly makes some un-PC remark while Barney pulls out his art school, liberal education and lays on the smackdown for Why Simon Is Wrong.
Hard as I am on Simon, his bossiness is... accurate? for those of us who are older siblings. I spent a lot of time with my brother and cousins going OKAY, WE DO IT THIS WAY in various imagining games. My games just tended to involve Robin Hood instead of cannibals.
I do love how Jane incorporates her practical suggestions into the game when she can, like, oh, maybe we don't need the telescope because we've got landmarks to navigate by instead? I can easily see her as a kindergarten teacher someday.
They poke around in the rooms a bit, and eventually notice that the walls for Simon and Barney's room don't match up with the room's interior. Of course, this means a secret passage behind the wardrobe. Which leads me to a little bit of an outburst...
I AM SO JEALOUS OF THESE DAMN KIDS. REALLY, I AM.
It's not that I don't think they should find a secret passage, because I seriously relish any instance where kids in the book I'm reading get to go into a secret passage. I lived for that stuff when I read Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins and the like. And yet, it was also one of those things where I'd get insanely jealous of the characters I was reading. Because, as a kid, I wanted nothing more than to find a secret passage in some house, any house. Every new house I was in, I went around tapping the walls to see if it sounded hollow. It'd be an extra bonus, I thought, if it was a secret passage used on the Underground Railroad. Of course, when you grow up in suburban subdivisions, houses don't tend to have such things.
In books, secret passages are a dime a dozen. Real life, stop ripping me off. I hope I'm not the only one who spent my childhood like this, at least?
Anyway, would the Drew children leave this passage unexplored? HELL TO THE NO.
Down into the attic we go! Cooper treats us to a delightful assortment of old objects in the storage space. Though, as someone with a dust allergy, the description does make me feel just a but sneezy. The kids decide to eat lunch down there, and there's some more cringey racism and some sexism from Simon as Jane calls them on being dirty. Shut up, Simon, you ARE covered in dust. I'm still jealous of the kids for getting to have a picnic in a secret passage, though.
We get some more insight into Jane as she gazes on the objects around her:
It was like reading the story of somebody's life, Jane thought, as she gazed at the tiny matchstick masts of the sailing ship, motionless forever in the green glass bottle. All of these things had been used once, had been part of every day in the house below. Someone had slept in the bed, anxiously awaited the minutes on the clock, pounced joyfully on each magazine as it arrived. But all these people were long dead, or gone away, and now the oddments of their lives were piled up here, forgotten. She found herself feeling rather sad.
In the midst of children exploring and pretending and just being kids, I like that Cooper pauses her story and allows Jane to introspect like this--to briefly touch on death and loss, even. Jane's character has a touch of melancholy, and that's okay. Cooper doesn't really try to force her into cheerfulness or innocence. I also like that we get further evidence of her empathy here. Though sometimes I wish she'd be a little more selfish. Ah well, all in good time.
In less melancholy news, this is the second time Simon's used the word "swizz" and I can't help but giggle at it. WTF does swizz even mean.
Barney tosses an apple core away, and the kids get worked up about rats. It starts as them all trying to wind each other up, and then they ALL start believing their own rhetoric. Anyway, it's enough that Barney is inspired to go retrieve the apple core, which leads us to...
PLOT POINT MACGUFFIN OBJECT.
Yes! Barney pulls out a roll of paper from the hole where he threw the apple core, and after the kids stare at it some while eating they discover that IT IS A SPECIAL DOCUMENT WHICH IS ALSO A MAP.
And then I die of jealousy some more. Because yeah, it's not like I expected life to work like books as a child, it's just that I took books as an example of how life SHOULD work, and there was a distinct lack of special documents which were also maps in my life.
This was also a moment where I paused and noted the old-fashioned pacing of the book. I feel like if this were a story I were writing, nowadays, my teachers and mentors would have insisted I introduce the map right away, or at least spend more time with establishing character moments in the first paragraph. Or maybe include a prequel, back in time, with someone throwing the map down the hole. Anyway, with the pacing nowadays, this is the sort of thing editors would want you to herald within the first few pages. I don't begrudge Cooper her own pacing choices, since literary conventions were a bit different fifty years ago, but it is something that jumped out at me. It's also something that would need to be addressed in a modern adaptation of the work, whether film or TV.
While the kids stare at the map, hoping to decipher it, Jane is the first to note that it's probably written in Latin. Obligatory moment of me going HECK YEAH LATIN SHOUT-OUT. Anyway, it leads to another Jane Character Moment which I found interesting:
"Well, Simon does Latin."
"Yes, come on, Simon, let's translate it," Jane said maliciously. At school she had not yet begun Latin, but he had been learning it for two years, and was rather superior about the fact.
"I don't think it's Latin at all," said Simon rebelliously. He peered at the manuscript again. "The writing's so odd, the letters all look the same. Like a lot of straight lines all in a row. The light in here isn't very good either."
"You're just making excuses."
"No, I'm not, it's jolly difficult."
"Well, if you can't even recognize Latin when you see it you can't be nearly as good as you make out."
Before now, Jane's either been sympathetic to others, or fussy--but fussy with a side of sympathy. This moment strikes me because it's probably the first time she's been outright negative and even a bit selfish. I think it's a good kind of selfish, in the end, because what I see here is a jealousy towards Simon for being further ahead of her in his studies. And of course being of jealous of that suggests she has an intellectual curiosity about Latin and is impatient to learn it. Of course, maybe I'm reading too far into things, but I think it's one of those negative character moments which tells us interesting things about the character.
Anyway, we do get the slightest inkling here that Jane isn't the wallflower she seems, and that she sometimes does resent her position as a Middle Child Between Two Strong Personalities.
Simon does a bit of decoding of the map (I agree, Latin manuscripts by dim light are difficult, and I have an MA in the subject!) and eventually deduces that the map belonged to a King Mark and a King Arthur. Of course he forgets the dative case as a possibility for their names. Whatever the case--no pun intended--Barney's Arthurian fanboyism switches on and he's suddenly SUPER EXCITED about this map. Because obviously it involves King Arthur, duh. Oh Barney, ILU. Jane, of course, tries to bring up practical concerns about the map, and maybe they should tell someone, but the boys are like PFFFF and overrule her. At that point, they notice it's getting close to dinner, and climb out of the hole, covered in dust.
Cooper treats us to more descriptions of Mrs. Palk's apple tart as the family has an awkward, slightly bickery dinner, and Merriman mysteriously broods. I swear, the food in this book. Also, I like that the bickering seems subdued and realistic, without getting too contrived. The Drews decide they need an after dinner walk, but, surprise! Some neighbors--the Witherses of the EVIL YACHT--have come by for a visit.
The Witherses are pleasant and tidy and polite and a bit too posh inviting the Drews to come out on their yacht, which of course means SOMETHING WEIRD BRO is up with them. Jane is the only one who senses it, of course. No one should be that tidy. I find it interesting that the Witherses tidiness is contrasted with the messiness of the children after they find the treasure map, though I'm unsure if Susan Cooper is trying to say too much there. Maybe that a little dirt never hurt anyone. Who knows?
Also, I just watched The Hound of the Baskervilles with Jeremy Brett, but I still feel like the Witherses should not remind me of the Stapletons. So please tell me to stop.
Alternately, they're also a bit camp, so I guess they could be Team Rocket, too.
The Witherses knowingly ask if the children explored and found anything, and Simon is inclined to lie. Anyway, Simon and Barney get their parents to give in and let them go on the EVIL YACHT the next day, but Jane feels like staying home. She convinces herself, after a while, that her intuitions are a little weird, and mostly attributes it to her fear of seasickness. Meanwhile I just want to hug her and give her tea like, JANE, IT'S OKAY, YOUR FEELINGS ARE VALID TOO.
At the very end of the chapter, Merriman is gone again. Fortunately, Cooper doesn't expect us to be surprised about it, just curious.
Overall thoughts on Chapters 2 and 3:
-We do get clearer pictures of each child, here. Simon is the take-charge one, or the bossy one, depending on the given moment in the text. Barney's the imaginative, faithful one, who can very definitely believe in what he imagines. While Simon imagines more out loud, I find it questionable that he's as connected to stories and the like as Barney. Jane's a bit harder to pin down, still, but hopefully we've managed to tease out a few threads of her personality.
-Merriman takes more of a back seat in these two chapters, which can be frustrating as you know he's out doing stuff, but I'm glad we got to know the kids a bit better.
-It's amazing how pervasive the sea is in these books. I'm so used to British things being set in London that I can forget how important the sea is to British culture.
-We've got the Withers set up as potential antagonists. It's interesting to me how much Cooper relies on intuition in her stories. In modern fantasy/sci-fi, intuition is almost entirely discounted as a Thing. I feel like authors only give their characters Bad Feelings about another character if they're to be disproven later on, which is weird because intuition CAN be helpful IRL. But Cooper... well, she'll use intuition a lot. Yet, I also find it interesting that Jane talks her way out of her intuitions, half the time something fantasy characters of previous eras don't do as much.