This is one of the most well-written young adult books I've ever read. They don't write 'em like this anymore! There's a reason Susan Cooper won the Newbery Medal for this. Her incredible, melodic descriptive language and her ability to interweave history, mythology, legend, and good old-fashioned fiction bring this book far beyond a traditional "boy with special powers" book. If you appreciate the English language and if you have an interest in history and legend, this one is for you. Susan Coo...

Not amazing, but I liked it. Kids' fantasy best suited for preteens who won't be troubled by Cooper's antipathy for systematic worldbuilding, but who will engage with the real-world stakes (reputation and livelihood) and be content to let the wondrous aspects of the story exist as wondrous and unresolvable. A fantasy for those who like to feel their way forward.

Okay the series has turned enjoyable again! It's funny, I think Cooper realised she'd made Will close to infallible in the previous book, so she's whacked him with a memory loss inducing illness at the start of this one. A bit ham handed but I'm just so thankful she realised the corner she'd written herself into!The illness is also an excellent excuse to move the whole story to Wales (Cause dontcha know? When you're recovering from a life threatening fever, rainy Wales is the PERFECT place to do...

I’ve been making a slow tour through Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence for a few months now. It’s undeniably an important series in the fantasy canon, but my personal reaction to it has been more ambivalent. I have been rather disappointed with the novels as stories. They’re brilliant examples of methodical mythological remixing. Yet in adjusting the tone of the books to aim them to her younger audience, Cooper also seems to feel it’s necessary to remove a great deal of the complexity a...

I'm beginning to think that this series would be better titled The Dark is Stumbling Around Awkwardly Without Ever Accomplishing Much. In this volume our heroes take on the Grey King, a villain who we're reminded every other paragraph is more powerful and evil than any other encountered so far.Despite this impressive reputation, the most evil things he manages to accomplish are (a) killing a few sheep and (b) making one small patch of ground briefly change shape. He also seems to have it out for...

These books are so beautiful. This one I hadn’t read since I was very young and it was better than I remembered. Will is sent to Wales to recover from a long illness. The setting in the Welsh countryside is rigged and beautiful. Here Will meets a boy, Bran and his dog Cafall, they become friends and the two boys fulfill Will’s quest to find the harp of gold and waken the sleepers. I just finished this and I am left haunted by the ending both glorious and tragic. Just wonderful.

Another slim book, at a YA length, which I think hurts the arc of this story to some extent, comprising the harp AND the sleepers. While the author's writing never feels hurried in description or tone, it seems that more time could have benefited the details and the character development of the story.Things happen quickly, even if described leisurely-ly; whys or why-nots are left unanswered (why Will's memory loss, when it came back so easily; why Bran and Cafall's initial behavior, except for i...

Like The Dark is Rising, this is a darker series entry with the dangers greater and peril at every turn. It's Will Stanton's story again, and he is aided by an odd, albino boy Bran who has an intriguing past. A poem of sorts has run through the series, identifying what has been happening--the finding of the 6 who go against the Dark and the accoutrement that accompanies them from the grail in the first volume to the beginning of the search for the golden harp in this one, along with the awakenin...

The really upsetting one. I'd been calling it that in my head all along, but I didn't realize I didn't actually remember why. It turns out this upset me so much as a child that I literally blanked out the relevant details; I remembered about two pages before it happened, in the same horrible swooping lurch that Will experiences as he realizes something bad is about to happen. Animal harm, man, that shit fucks you up. /profound.Anyway. I found this intensely interesting. It follows on very well f...

You know you love a book from your childhood a lot when you go out of your way on trips abroad to see the places where the action happened. Cooper's fourth novel in the DiR series is so steeped, no, drowned! in all things Welsh that you can't help but want to get the hell there and check it out. Which I did many years ago. Her works in this series especially are refulgent and replete with all kinds of British lore, especially Arthurian, and then some, but she reaches new heights of weaving them

So, I've been reading Cooper's Dark is Rising series, which I somehow never got to as a kid despite hearing so much about it, and knowing it won a ton of awards. This one, for instance, won the Newbery, one of the biggest American awards for young adult fiction. And the overwhelming sense I've come away with so far is: why?Don't get me wrong, there are moments of good description, and good story-telling. But it is hung on a framework that doesn't really work. Sure, in theory we have an epic batt...

boy meets boy; antics ensue.boy with Old soul meets boy with dog with old soul; old king wishes they never met.sick boy with too many siblings meets sickly boy with some serious father issues.little weirdo meets his match in another little weirdo; the latter teaches the former how to pronounce Welsh words.super-powered boy meets albino boy with golden eyes; the former teaches the latter the meaning of friendship, power, and why old kings are bad news for everyone.Ancient Immortal Being meets Boy...

*Happy sigh* I just finished rereading this one again last night. With the exception of the first book in the Dark is Rising series, I love all of them -- atmospheric, dreamy, and creepy, the lot of them. And steeped in old folklore and told in lovely prose so that they feel like they grew out of the ground instead of being written by a modern author. I cannot recommend them highly enough . . . but do read them in order.

Normally, The Grey King would be my favourite of the five books that make up this sequence. Something about the setting in Wales, and Bran's loneliness and arrogance, and of course the tie-in with Arthuriana, and the way that it begins to bring in some more moral ambiguity when John Rowlands questions the coldness at the heart of the Light. Somehow, I didn't love it as much as usual this time -- possibly because I'd just spent a lot of time debating the merits of Greenwitch with various people,

I remember loving Over Sea, Under Stone more as a child, probably because of the Drew children. And there's a lot to love about The Dark Is Rising and Greenwitch. But, rereading/listening as an adult, this one is my favorite, and it's clear why Susan Cooper won the Newbery for it. The conflict intensifies, key players are revealed for their true nature, and the relationship between Bran and Owen Davies is one of the best father-son reconciliations in children's fiction, if not in all fiction. I

This is book 4 of the sequence and we are back with Will and with out and out fantasy after the previous blend of adventure story with fantasy and the Drew children's return.Will is sent to Wales to recuperate after a serious illness which not only weakens him physically, but makes him forget that he is an Old One, last of that mysterious group who serve the Light and oppose the rising of the Dark. At first he is unaware that he has to perform a quest to regain another object of power to help th...