The Dark is Rising
Ratings47
Average rating4
BBC podcast version, enough of a taster to want to read properly next year.
The story of Will Stanton and The Old Ones is an enthralling, snowy Christmas quest full of cryptids and dark magic. Definitely a fun read! My only criticism are the week female human characters, which read more like nuisances than anything else.
This felt like a low-detail story about an old, sacred mythology, which is great, except it also needs characters with agency, and maybe a plot. Will has no agency–things happen to him and the world around him, and occasionally he knows what to do because Old Ones have Knowledge, but there's no decision making in order to address obstacles. Similarly, the plot feels preordained. It has no agency in its shaping. This is just How Things Go in the old story.
I recall liking it as a kid, but never being super into it. That's sort of how I feel now, but I like it less.
I remember liking [b:Over Sea, Under Stone 11312 Over Sea, Under Stone (The Dark is Rising, #1) Susan Cooper https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1166468889s/11312.jpg 742] a lot more than this one, but I finished that one years ago.This felt a lot less like an adventure and a lot more like ...a kid who had a bunch of stuff happen to him. And it wasn't even, like, “kid gets swept up in major adventure.” More like “kid goes about his day, but every now and then weird stuff happens that he's somehow an important part of... without his actually making any decisions about those things.”That's my major takeaway from the story. My impression, and my objection.Really wanted to love this series. Not sure I want to invest more time in it, after this one. Maybe I will in a while.
A book that has stuck with me, whose themes and visions appear in life and literature, and whose songs and rhymes pop into my head.