Now it's a fight to get him to stop reading long enough for us to discuss the questions. (Because I can't just sit there, donchaknow. Towards the end, he's reading 10, 20 pages in one sitting by himself (out loud, remember) as I sit and work on my knitting. He starts sneaking in an extra page once in a while, 'accidentally' skipping my turn. We take turns reading out loud, 2 pages at a time, and each time his turn is over he hands the book to me like it burned him to touch it, let alone read it.īut then, after we hit the end of the second chapter or so, I notice something: he starts to enjoy it. We get started, and the first chapter goes just like I expected it to. I just shrugged and told him to suck it up and drive on. He moaned and groaned and hated life, that he'd have to do something so awful as reading. I read this series myself about a year or two ago, so when he needed a book to do for literature in his homeschool, I suggested that he pick this one and I'd do it with him. Visit her Facebook pages: Getting my brother (12) to read is liking getting a cat to take a bath, getting a high-schooler to go to school, getting a cheerleader to go to computer club.Īll those really difficult things in life. Recent books include the collaborative project 'The Exquisite Corpse Adventure' and her biography of Jack Langstaff titled 'The Magic Maker.' Her newest book is 'Ghost Hawk.' When Cooper is not working, she enjoys playing piano, gardening, and traveling. She has also written books for adults, as well as plays and Emmy-nominated screenplays, many in collaboration with the actor Hume Cronyn, whom she married in 1996. By that time, Susan Cooper had been living in America for 13 years, having moved to marry her first husband, an American professor, and was stepmother to three children and the mother of two.Ĭooper went on to write other well-received novels, including 'The Boggart' (and its sequel 'The Boggart and the Monster'), 'King of Shadows', and 'Victory,' as well as several picture books for young readers with illustrators such as Ashley Bryan and Warwick Hutton.

After attending Oxford, where she became the first woman to ever edit that university's newspaper, Cooper worked as a reporter and feature writer for London's Sunday Times her first boss was James Bond creator Ian Fleming.Ĭooper wrote her first book for young readers in response to a publishing house competition 'Over Sea, Under Stone' would later form the basis for her critically acclaimed five-book fantasy sequence, 'The Dark Is Rising.' The fourth book in the series, 'The Grey King,' won the Newbery Medal in 1976. As a child, she loved to read, as did her younger brother, who also became a writer.

Susan Cooper was born in 1935, and grew up in England's Buckinghamshire, an area that was green countryside then but has since become part of Greater London. Susan Cooper's latest book is the YA novel 'Ghost Hawk' (2013)

The dark is rising book