Over Sea, Under Stone: Author's Note

Apparently, the internet does not yet have a deconstruction series of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence.  This is a problem.  And what follows is an attempt to rectify it.  

So, let's start at the beginning: Over Sea, Under Stone, the stand-alone children's fantasy adventure story which became the first installment of the series.  I encountered it in elementary school, some years ago, and enjoyed it immensely.  Let's see how it holds up today. I have a good idea of the main plot points, but will be hopefully turning a fresh eye to the execution, particularly to character interaction and development. Spoilers ahead, but only for the first book unless otherwise noted. (Style note, I'm going to use single apostrophes for paraphrases/suppositions/idioms and save the quotation marks for actual book quotations.)  

The copy I grabbed for this project begins with an Author's Note (date 2013, which explains why I didn't remember it). It's a nice two page explanation of how the book, and consequently the series was started, with a little background on the author herself (lived in London, worked as a journalist, wrote the story for a literary contest on “family adventure”). The two bits that leaped out at me were that she'd studied under Tolkien as an undergraduate (for which I am terribly jealous), and that her early childhood was shaped by the blitz.

As she put it, “Until I was ten years old, my family and I had spent a lot of time in the air-raid shelter in the backyard, listening to the bombs of World War II... My imagination and I grew up in a world in which nobody was safe.” That bit caught my attention because this project was inspired by comments on Ana Mardoll's Narnia deconstructions. While The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe featured a group of children around Cooper's age during the war, her work is, in her opinion, shaped by the experience of being a child at that time. I can't help imagining her as Lucy Pevensie, giving C.S. Lewis a look and saying 'No, this is a fantasy story which explores what it was like to grew up in the shadow of WWII.' Anyway, it'll be interesting to see if/how this knowledge shades my re-reading.