“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper
Aladdin Paperbacks (2000)
196 pages

First things first: I love the Drew children. I tend to like books with siblings in them, especially if they get along well and care for each other. It’s probably because I have five younger siblings and the very idea of quarrelling and quibbling all the time gets on my nerves!

Okay, okay, so that probably shouldn’t have been the thing to start this off with. Over Sea, Under Stone is the first book in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence. I don’t know how to say this, but I feel if I had read the book on its own without knowing what comes after, and without expecting there was more to come after, I would have given this book an A++. It reads like a great mystery/detective story with a satisfying ending (though there is obvious that there is more to come), with some supernatural elements thrown in. But there are other books in the sequence, and I have read them, and when I compare Over Sea, Under Stone to any of the books that come after it, it feels like something is missing from this book.

(Which, you know, you should parse that as THIS SEQUENCE IS SO AWESOMELY MARVELLOUS that you have to read the whole thing, oh please.)

More than anything, Over Sea, Under Stone feels like a read of one of those older mystery novels I used to read when I was younger — maybe one of Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five books, or perhaps something from the Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys series, but with a solid story line and slightly more advanced vocabulary and even better writing, and a touch of Arthurian legend and folklore mixed in.

The three Drew siblings, Simon, Jane and Barney, are off for a vacation in Cornwall with their parents. Their Great-Uncle Merry meets them at the train station, and they find an ancient treasure map in the attic of the house that they’re staying in. They begins searching for this treasure with their great-uncle’s help — though cryptic hints may be more like it — and realise that they are not the only ones who are looking for this treasure. The bad guys are bad here, and dangerous, and they don’t care if you are kids, and while it’s never really spelled out what would happen if the other side got the treasure, you just know you don’t want it to fall into their hands.

They’re bright kids, those three, but nothing they do seems overly fantastic — they’re pretty much ordinary, and that was part of the appeal to me. Of course, Great-Uncle Merry was a great help and they would have got into awful scrapes without him around. And he listens to to them, that’s the best part — he listens and respects their opinions, and who wouldn’t have wanted an adult like that around when they were kids?

I still have a few quibbles with my edition of the book. Not with the story or writing — more on the editing/proofreading part of it. For some reason I kept noticing missing closing quotation marks, and that distracted me a bit. Some other punctuation marks as well, particularly at the end of sentences. I — uh, I’ve inserted them with a pencil; they irked me that much. Maybe it’s just me carrying work habits back home, but well, there you go.

But that’s a small matter, and it doesn’t detract from the story. It’s a great start to a great series, and I am very, very glad I started reading The Dark is Rising sequence. ♥