Silver on the Tree (The Dark is Rising, #5) in Into the Forest

Sep 24, 2018 mark monday rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: legendarium, inbetweenworld

an excellent finale for a smashing series. I particularly appreciated how the chapters alternated between magical duo Will & Bran and the resolutely "normal" Drew children, showing their differing reactions to the Rising. everything comes together nicely in the end. special shout-out to a superb new villain: The White Rider! *swoon* yes, I'm swooning for an infernal, chaos-loving, completely dastardly Lord of the Dark. The White Rider gave me some wonderful chills, especially during the train ri an excellent finale for a smashing series. I particularly appreciated how the chapters alternated between magical duo Will & Bran and the resolutely "normal" Drew children, showing their differing reactions to the Rising. everything comes together nicely in the end. special shout-out to a superb new villain: The White Rider! *swoon* yes, I'm swooning for an infernal, chaos-loving, completely dastardly Lord of the Dark. The White Rider gave me some wonderful chills, especially during the train ride reveal.

for me:
The Dark Is Rising > The Grey King > Silver on the Tree > Greenwitch > Over Sea, Under Stone

different ratings for different books; overall the series is 5 stars. a favorite among all of the series I've read. I found that in my 2nd and sometimes 3rd reread that my feelings about the individual novels have pretty much stayed the same.

there's enough excellent reviews out there for this book that I'm not sure I have much more to say. except one thing, in response to my friend Alex who made a comment on an earlier book's review thread. the comment was basically sharing their dislike of a scene in this book where Will and members of his family stick up for a bullied Indian child and then face off against the bully's smiling racist of a father. the dislike is understandable: Alex felt it was yet another example of white people rescuing poor lil' brown people.

this brown person (tan, really) begs to differ! they are quite far from being condescending throwaway scenes, ones created only to illustrate the Stanton family's essential goodness. in many ways, these scenes are the heart and the point of the whole series. specifically, what is causing The Dark to rise at this point in human history?

we've had hints in prior books about a previous Rising, and in this book we have the whole story: that Rising was the brutal incursion of Vikings and the wholesale slaughter of those that they came across; the whispers of The Dark are behind those invasions, making those particular incursions different from other such atrocities. in that first Rising, the idea is that humans have become inured to slaughtering other humans, and The Dark has taken advantage of that tendency and turned it into a blank apathy or a mindless cruelty. a disinterest in anything besides slaughter.

this modern Rising is different, except for its basic mindlessness and blankness, cruelty and apathy. those things are not necessarily transformed into atrocity. that mindless apathy and blank cruelty instead become a new sort of tool and weapon for The Dark: namely, the complacent and knee-jerk rejection of difference - as embodied by attitudes towards immigrants from exploited former colonial territories - and the tendency to reject that difference without empathy or any attempt to understand those immigrants' context and England's role in creating that context. this is a political point and a comment on human nature that Cooper is explicitly making. it is important to recognize that point if the reader truly wants to understand what Cooper is describing as a modern evil. indeed, this evil is the very source of how the dark is able to spread, and to rise.

sorta relevant for today's world too, eh? ...more

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Jul 24, 2011 Sienna rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011

The opening was promising, with Will reading to his brothers from John Gerard's Herbal, a weighty, plagiaristic tome first published in 1597. I deal with this and other early modern herbals in my research, so the reference filled me with delight. Overall, though, this is one of the weaker books in the series, and not just because Cooper used the word "sepulchrally" once more. I found it easy to put down, even at ostensibly high-tension moments. Again, the conflicts with the Dark resolved themsel ...more

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