The Dark Is Rising Sequence (Books 1-5)

by Susan Cooper

book data

1,866 ratings, 4.41 average rating, 294 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		55%
4		32%
3		9%
2		1%
1		0%

edit

published

October 31st 1993 (first published 1977) by Simon Pulse

binding

Paperback, 1148 pages

isbn

0020425651 (isbn13: 9780020425656)

description

Joined by destiny, the lives of the Drew children, Will Stanton, and a boy named Bran weave together in an exquisite, sometimes terrifying tapestry o...more

find at: Amazon | Half.com | Barnes & Noble | Abebooks | compare prices…

new topic
discuss this book

topics	posts	views	last activity
100+ Book Challenge: Tracy's Books for 2009	19	68	7 days ago, 10:10PM
Arthuriana -- all...: Suggestions	17	36	18 days ago, 07:30AM
Beyond Reality: Which book format do you prefer?	26	47	06/01/2009 09:41AM
Diana Wynne Jones...: What other books do you read?	26	35	04/06/2009 09:49AM
love this series!	2	15	05/26/2008 01:47PM

friend reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

lists with this book

Best Fantasy Series and Trilogies

151 books | 461 voters

Best Arthurian Fiction

82 books | 165 voters

More lists...

other reviews (showing 1-20 of 2,287)

sort: default (?) | date
filters: all | text-only

09/14/07

Adam rated it:

This series is fantastic, and has been horridly overlooked, particularly so seeming that our current culture seems so fascinated with all things Potter. Not that The Dark Is Rising is anything like Harry Potter - not at all. It's thickly steeped in Celtic and Arthurian legend, is relentless in its exploration of a myriad of layers of history and time, and simply reeks of magic. I love this series, and have for years. Within the past two years, I introduced these books to my wife, who seethed...more

Like this review? yes (4 people liked it)

add a comment

07/16/07

Kerry rated it:

Read in July, 2007

recommends it for: anyone, but especially kids/teens

I just finished the final book in the series the other day, and it was pretty great. As a whole, Cooper's The Dark is Rising series was well written, and the stories flowed from one to the other without being too repetitive. I really enjoyed jumping right in to each book, and they went by pretty fast. While it is definitely a series for a younger audience, I was impressed by how intricately it went into the different Arthurian legends and such. I loved the character of Will, how he was able to b...more

Like this review? yes (2 people liked it)

add a comment

09/05/07

Phreid rated it:

Broader in scope and skill than Harry Potter, deeper in characterization and theme than Lord of the Rings, The Dark Is Rising Sequence is a modern-day addition to the King Arthur mythos. New insight is brought to the battle between Light and Dark, but while nearly all the players are new the atmosphere is the same.

This is Susan Cooper's magnum opus; she never wrote anything quite so good again. It's usually billed as childrens' fare because the main characters are young, but the writ...more

Like this review? yes (2 people liked it)

add a comment

11/29/07

Rachel rated it:

Read in January, 1990

recommends it for: EVERYONE

Okay, the first thing to keep in mind is that Susan Cooper wrote these books long before JK Rowling was writing, so if you see the parallels of an English boy who discovers he has magical powers on his eleventh birthday...well, you just have to suck it up and admit that Cooper did it first.

These are AMAZING books. I was trying to think of which one I liked best, but they're all so good! Much darker than most children's fantasy. Very scary. When I was 10, I didn't sleep for days afte...more

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

add a comment

06/06/07

Andy rated it:

bookshelves: readownedloved

This was my absolute favorite series of children/early adolescent books. If I recall correctly (I reread all of these just a few years ago) Susan Cooper does not make so noticeable a shift in dumbing down the language or sentence structure for young readers, which I like a lot. It's a fantasy-ish story, but set in, well, what would have been current day for Susan Cooper at the time of writing it. It is difficult to review all of these books at once, because some are better than others, and th...more

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

add a comment

03/24/07

John added it

bookshelves: fantasy--arthuriana

Will Stanton has a strange eleventh birthday. Let's just say ordinary time (chronos, to borrow a term from M. L'Engle) stops -- and that isn't the most fantastic thing. As the story unfolds, Arthur makes an appearance...but I can't say more without giving away the plot.

I'm captivated each time I read this series. (digression: don't read them in the order listed on goodreads.) Especially memorable is Cooper's portrayal of Light and Dark interactions with "ordinary people:" t...more

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

add a comment

05/04/07

Rebecca rated it:

bookshelves: best-books-ever, to-re-read

Read in September, 1990

recommends it for: anyone

If you like:
-Harry Potter
-Philip Pullman
-Narnia
-King Arthur
-magic
-myth
-funny things
-English people
-any people
-big ideas
-reading
-books
you will love:
The Dark is Rising sequence.
(any of the above is sufficient.)
These are the books that made me love reading, that made me sneak a flashlight under the covers at night to pick up where my father had last read aloud. The sequence begins mundanely, with three c...more

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

add a comment

07/23/07

Maria rated it:

(review of isbn 0140316884)

bookshelves: alltimefavourites

Read in November, 1990

Long before there was Harry Potter, there was Will Stanton.

Again, my aunt Michele (who is probably barely talking to me just now, apologies again) was the wonderful person who gave me this book. She gave it to me for my 11th birthday, and someone else gave me scented pillows, and I can still smell those pillows everytime I opened the book. Sadly, my copy has finally disintegrated, so I shall have to replace it again before Christmas of this year.

This book is wonderful -...more

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

3 comments

02/26/09

Emily rated it:

I'm sure most of you friends who might end up reading this review have already read this series, but for anyone who hasn't, these books are the pre-Potter classics that may have really sparked J.K.'s joy of reading when she was a girl (in fact, I do remember reading one particular article in which Rowling mentions Susan Cooper as a favorite hero).

So Shelly Radmall and I were talking about being Anglophiles when we were chatting last at a girls' night out. I asked her if she'd read t...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

01/10/09

Caroline rated it:

Read in December, 2008

I read two or three of these books as a kid, so when a full set emerged from one of those Mystery Grocery Bags we all have in our upstairs closets, I decided to give them a go. These five books are easy to read - two of them are barely thicker than a catalog - and were pleasant ways to pass the time, but I can't claim that I'm wowed by Cooper's art.

In fact, I'd say I liked these books less as an adult than as a kid, which is unusual for me. The premise is interesting: a timeless and ...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

03/19/09

Frankie rated it:

bookshelves: fantasy

Read in August, 2007

I once again admit to buying a book (series) for the wrong reason: I saw the movie preview for "The Dark is Rising", noticed Christopher Eccleston, and said "I gotta get me some of that!" ;)

As it turns out, the book series, start to finish, was great. It's a nice fantasy series that incorporates a fair bit of Arthurian legend. The Drew children, in the first book, are nice kids who have a great adventure. The Stanton family (actually introduced in the second book)...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

08/15/07

Matt rated it:

I was given these as a christmas present by a friend who knew I had a penchant for things that evoked the feeling of old English winters. There's something about the mythology that drives these books that conjures the sense of hiding indoors by a roaring fire while the winter winds blow cold outside. It's like Lloyd Alexander transposed to the modern day, or a reflection of Alan Garner. Easy reads, definitely written with kids in mind, but the stories are timeless.

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

add a comment

03/26/09

Kristen rated it:

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in November, 2007

recommended to Kristen by: Anna McMorrow

I read these books before giving them to Irene. She is currently reading them with Rob. Again, these are very difficult to read aloud because of all the welsh words and such. Rob would probably give them a lower rating. It took me a bit to really start getting into the books. It was hard going from book 1 to book 2 b/c, unlike many series, these don't have all of the same people in each book. Once I was in them, I just kept going and enjoying them until I was finished.
I'm not sure th...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

12/30/08

Sara rated it:

Read in January, 1994

This is also one of my favorite young adult fantasy series.

The battle is set between the good (the Light) and evil (the Dark) with regular old humans unwittingly shoved betwixt. The different books of the series revolve around different characters, all of whom are well written and intriguing, and in some of the books the different character sets mix amongst each other.

The series is set in Britain, with one book even in Wales, which as a foolish American I find interesting fr...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

11/27/08

Scurra rated it:

(review of isbn 0140316884)

Read in January, 1980

One of the best kids fantasy series, it's hard to believe that the first volume was written more than forty years ago, with the subsequent ones following over the next ten years - I am just old enough to remember getting Silver on the Tree when it first appeared; the wait was almost as bad as for Deathly Hallows! The difference here being that SotT is so much more successful because Cooper wasn't trapped by a preordained format, even if the outcome was always going to be the same.

So ...more One of the best kids fantasy series, it's hard to believe that the first volume was written more than forty years ago, with the subsequent ones following over the next ten years - I am just old enough to remember getting Silver on the Tree when it first appeared; the wait was almost as bad as for Deathly Hallows! The difference here being that SotT is so much more successful because Cooper wasn't trapped by a preordained format, even if the outcome was always going to be the same.

So the first book is a classic children's adventure story, with a bit of magic thrown in, but handled in a nicely low-key sort of way; it's unclear whether Cooper really had all of her masterplan in mind at the time although there are plenty of surreptitious visits by the Old Ones throughout the book, albeit not acknowledged as such. And the quest is pretty traditional too, even down to the bad guys needing to be terminally stupid for the plot to work.

But it's the second book, The Dark Is Rising, that is the clear stand-out title and the reason I give the series as a whole five stars. Here, Cooper stripmines English mythology and delivers a tightly-integrated, completely coherent world that sets up the series and does some good retcon work on the first book. Sure, she doesn't exactly shake the archetypes (the Dark must essentially always be One, where the Light is always Many etc.) but to be fair the story needs them to work. Unlike the first book, this one is full of surprises and the key themes of sacrifice and misunderstanding are unexpectedly subtle and well-handled.

Greenwitch and The Grey King are much lesser works. The first is merely a better and more accomplished version of Over Sea Under Stone (but which would not work without that original story), and the second feels like a weird place-holder - a lengthy prologue to the finalé.

But oh boy, what a finalé. Silver on the Tree takes all the threads of the story and ties them together in a gloriously satisfying whole. Yes, we know how it is going to end, because it can't end any other way. That's hardly the point. The shocks are genuine; the big reveal is handled to perfection and even the inevitable climax doesn't outstay its welcome.

Those people who rave about Harry Potter need to be reminded that stories of that calibre (and I really do like HP!) do come along more frequently than you might expect. And, sadly, they are also forgotten just as quickly - or, worse, eviscerated by a movie version that shows no real understanding of or even interest in the story (as happened here, or with The Golden Compass) because they think SFX are all that matters. Rant over.(less)

Like this review? yes

add a comment

02/29/08

Torie rated it:

Read in February, 2008

My partner's aunt, a practitioner of Chinese medicine, homeschooling mom to two teenagers, and owner of an impressive personal library, turned me on to these books. On my first visit to her house, I tested the waters by casually letting slip my crazed love of 1970's-era YA novels, and she politely asked me if I'd like to see her "kid's books closet." Now, you can imagine what kind of collection a homeschooling mom has collected over the years, but when she opened the door, I wanted to ...more

Like this review? yes

1 comment

02/02/08

Cindy rated it:

Well, Harry Potter left me bereft. I immediately began other books to help deal with that post-reading malaise but I just couldn't find anything that really grabbed me. And then, since HP gave me a newfound appreciate for all things YA adventure, I decided to finally reread The Dark is Rising and read the whole series. For years, I have been building up my book collection with classics and with works read throughout my years in public schools.

The Dark is Rising was one such read...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

05/12/09

Allen K added it

Read in March, 2009

I don't think I'd read all of these as a child. I enjoyed doing so as an adult. Still, the effect was mildly pleasant -- cozy British children and vague mystic forces with a dollop of Arthurian myth can only take one so far. Huge coincidence: I was reading the fifth book when I left for a trip to Mississippi. I left it at home. A colleague had brought it along and was in about the same place. Who would have imagined we'd both be on book five of a young adult fantasy series?

Like this review? yes

add a comment

02/03/09

Andrea rated it:

I love the series as a whole. Some of the books are better than others, but together it's fantastic. I read them as a kid and then again just a couple of years ago. I enjoyed the series as much as an adult as I had as a kid. It incorporates Arthurian legend into the story of a boy whose responsibility it is to save the world from the forces of evil. It's good old fashioned good vs evil and it's a fun read.

Like this review? yes

add a comment

12/27/08

Laura rated it:

bookshelves: middle-school-and-up

Read in January, 1995

Amazing books series. Looking for something quick to read, with celtic mythology, welsh influence, and arthurian legend intertwined? This is your first and last stop. Cooper introduces and develops fantastic characters and weaves them into this plotline that is remnicent of so many other stories yet unique and creative on its own. Generally it is more geared for young adult readers. Like middle school aged.

Like this review? yes

add a comment

« previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … 114 115 next »

recent status updates | recommend it | blog it

combine
other editions (5)

More editions...

quotes from this book

"On the day of the dead, when the year too dies, Must the youngest open the oldest hills Through the door of the birds, where the breeze breaks. There fire shall fly from the raven boy, And the silver eyes that see the wind, And the light shall have the harp of gold. By the pleasant lake the Sleepers lie, On Cadfan’s Way where the kestrels call; Though grim from the Grey King shadows fall, Yet singing the golden harp shall guide To break their sleep and bid them ride. When light from the lost land shall return, Six Sleepers shall ride, six Signs shall burn, And where the midsummer tree grows tall By Pendragon’s sword the Dark shall fall. Y maent yr mynyddoedd yn canu, ac y mae’r arglwyddes yn dod." More quotes...