King of Shadows - Hardcover

Cooper, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0689828179 ISBN 13: 9780689828171

Publisher: Margaret K McElderry, 1999

Synopsis

Nat Field's short life has been shadowed by loss and horror. His one escape is his talent for acting, and he has been picked by a dazzling international director to perform at Shakespeare's Globe, London's amazing new copy of the theater for which William Shakespeare wrote his plays four hundred years ago.
Brought from all over the U.S., the members of the American Company of Boys begin to rehearse at the Globe. But strange, eerie echoes of the past begin creeping in. Nat goes to bed mysteriously sick -- is it the dreadful bubonic plague of the sixteenth century? He wakes up healthy, but he's no longer in the present, he's in 1599, acting at the original Globe. And his costar is Shakespeare: no longer a vague historical figure, but a quirky, warm-hearted writer/actor whose friendship changes Nat forever.
Nat has a new life, blazing with excitement, edged with danger, but why is he here? Is he trapped in Elizabethan London? Will he ever go home?
Playing deftly with Time and Destiny as she did in her classic fantasy sequence The Dark Is Rising, Susan Cooper tells a vivid, fascinating and ultimately very moving story of the painful business of growing up, against a background of the timeless, glowing magic of the theater.

About this title

Review:

King of Shadows is an exceptional work by Susan Cooper, bestselling author of

The Dark is Rising, Over Sea Under Stone, Silver on the Tree and many other magical and atmospheric books, and will not disappoint those who already wallow in the author's startling ability to conjure up clear images of place and time with the stroke of a pen.

Here we meet young Nat Field, a boy actor visiting London to perform at The Globe Theatre. Nat soon falls ill, and much to the amazement of the doctors looking after him, he has contracted the Bubonic Plague. As one young actor lies in isolation in Guy's Hospital, another wakes up in Elizabethan London and is drawn into rehearsals for A Midsummer Night's Dream alongside William Shakespeare himself and the two form a bond that can never be broken, even through time.

King of Shadows is a daring and complex novel, set against the backdrop of the life of an unhappy child who, by travelling unwittingly through time, learns how to face his real life troubles. As ever, Cooper's delicious descriptive prose combine with her elegant dialogue to bring her characters vividly to life, never taking the easy option, but allowing her players to develop and come to terms with their lives in their own time.

A remarkable book that is as intriguing as it is entertaining, King of Shadows could well be the best Susan Cooper yet. (Age 10 and over) --Susan Harrison

Review:

"A dramatic and sensory feast."--Kirkus Reviews

*"Readers will be swept up in Nat's detailed, sensory-filled observations of life in Shakespeare's time...[The] overall shape of the novel, with its finely drawn connections between Nat's story and A Midsummer Night's Dream, is superb."--The Horn Book, starred review

*"[A] masterful novel."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

*"Part historical fiction, part fantasy, wholly entertaining."--Booklist, starred review

*"Readers...will revel in the hurly-burly of rehearsals and the performance before the queen, the near discoveries, the company rivalries, and some neatly drawn parallels."--School Library Journal, starred review

"In her portrayal of Shakespeare Cooper has created a superhero...[she] entertains her contemporary readers while giving them a first-rate theatrical education."--The New York Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Margaret K McElderry
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0689828179
• ISBN 13: 9780689828171
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 186