I didn't know it ever appeared in one volume! Have you read it yet? I read the first book and was somewhat underwhelmed; haven't decided whether to read the others
Oh yes, I read them all when I was a child. Though I have to admit that the cover of the book scared me too much to try them for ages! (It has a stained glass window design on it with a skull and some other creepy things).
The first book, Over Sea, Under Stone, I think is by far the weakest - it was written quite a while before the others I believe and isn't as connected to the others, or as intense (it feels like it's for younger readers to me). I think that is why they are starting the film adaptation with the second, The Dark is Rising, which won at least one award for children's literature and is just fabulous - chilling and intense and hard in some of the choices that happen, with old myths woven in beautifully.
The other three are just as good as The Dark is Rising - Over Sea, Under Stone gives a taste and it's good to have read it for things that happen later, but the sequence doesn't really get going until the second book. Susan Cooper is particularly good at building a very unsettling atmosphere and some of the scenes from the later books still stick with me as being very powerful (and creepy, some of them).
This is one reason I postulated that she might be psychic; there's just enough textev to make it plausible, and if gives Jack a good reason for wanting her around.
Yeah, that would work for me though I'm not sure it was what the writers were thinking. I can see Jack wanting someone with some real-world investigation skills to bolster his team of bad-at-social-interaction geeks, someone who can deal with the public and the police for him, and who's trained in procedures and techniques that the others presumably aren't. And Gwen does seem to do some of that for them, but I would think Jack would also want a bit more than that rather than just enticing the first policeperson to catch his eye.
Of course, it could just be that Jack thinks she's cute and sexy
It probably didn't hurt! Maybe Gwen caught his attention, and then he looked her up and decided she had useful qualities... I don't really see how Jack could know that Gwen had psychic abilities at that point.
Though "ordinary" is hardly a word I'd use for Gwen, either. She's a emotion-generator.
"We're running low on empathy again! Hook up the emotion-generator, quick!"
Probably not quite how you meant that phrase, but it did give me a lovely image of Gwen as a kind of smiley device in the Hub that Jack turns on when he thinks everyone is getting too jaded...
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2007-04-29 03:00 pm (UTC)I didn't know it ever appeared in one volume! Have you read it yet? I read the first book and was somewhat underwhelmed; haven't decided whether to read the others
Oh yes, I read them all when I was a child. Though I have to admit that the cover of the book scared me too much to try them for ages! (It has a stained glass window design on it with a skull and some other creepy things).
The first book, Over Sea, Under Stone, I think is by far the weakest - it was written quite a while before the others I believe and isn't as connected to the others, or as intense (it feels like it's for younger readers to me). I think that is why they are starting the film adaptation with the second, The Dark is Rising, which won at least one award for children's literature and is just fabulous - chilling and intense and hard in some of the choices that happen, with old myths woven in beautifully.
The other three are just as good as The Dark is Rising - Over Sea, Under Stone gives a taste and it's good to have read it for things that happen later, but the sequence doesn't really get going until the second book. Susan Cooper is particularly good at building a very unsettling atmosphere and some of the scenes from the later books still stick with me as being very powerful (and creepy, some of them).
This is one reason I postulated that she might be psychic; there's just enough textev to make it plausible, and if gives Jack a good reason for wanting her around.
Yeah, that would work for me though I'm not sure it was what the writers were thinking. I can see Jack wanting someone with some real-world investigation skills to bolster his team of bad-at-social-interaction geeks, someone who can deal with the public and the police for him, and who's trained in procedures and techniques that the others presumably aren't. And Gwen does seem to do some of that for them, but I would think Jack would also want a bit more than that rather than just enticing the first policeperson to catch his eye.
Of course, it could just be that Jack thinks she's cute and sexy
It probably didn't hurt! Maybe Gwen caught his attention, and then he looked her up and decided she had useful qualities... I don't really see how Jack could know that Gwen had psychic abilities at that point.
Though "ordinary" is hardly a word I'd use for Gwen, either. She's a emotion-generator.
"We're running low on empathy again! Hook up the emotion-generator, quick!"
Probably not quite how you meant that phrase, but it did give me a lovely image of Gwen as a kind of smiley device in the Hub that Jack turns on when he thinks everyone is getting too jaded...