"The Dark Is Rising" - Classic or monumentally boring DUD

it has defenders here tho i seem to recall (tico tico to thread?)

i'm currently struggling through "the giant under the snow" which at the time (= mid-70s) i thought wz quite scary (ENOUGH WITH THE FLYING ALREADY!! )

Are you reading the five-book volume or the actual "Dark Is Rising" book (#2 of 5) DV?

5-book one - starts very slowly with "Over Sea Under Stone", sluggish jolly hockey-sticks romp. So you might like it more as it goes on.

Actual book - starts with probably the best bit in the whole series, menaced by crows and lovely evocative time-travel stuff. So if you don't like that there's no hope.

Susan Cooper is good on landscape and imagery, not so hot on characters, it struck me re-reading them last year. Her boy hero is a bit of a prig, too, and the plot falls apart completely in the fifth book. I think the problem is that the Dark is never actually very strong or frightening except for about 50 pages in Book 2. Given that its weapons include hypnotic orangeade and killer foxes and that the Light ppl are always presented as being humungously powerful it's hard to get too much of a sense of threat.

(There has been a thread on ILE about it before, I believe)

(and it's Susan *Cooper*, incidentally)

(and I agree with tico: the first book isn't as good as the rest, and the last is incredibly bizarre)

Thinking about it actually I think TDIR is pretty much the end of that sub-tradition in English children's literature, where the history and heritage and landscape of England is a really central concern. The Silver Chair/Elidor/Harry Potter counter-tradition (where (modern) England is something that needs to be got away from) has 'won' I think, for now.

(warning: don't read 15 william maynes in a row then a novel (adult or otherwise) by PRETTY MUCH ANYONE ELSE, cz they don't stand up)

what's the correct author's name got to do with it? a boring book is boring no matter who it's by.

this is what I am reading. there is no hope.

not selling in potter league obv, so not "winning" in that sense ? but totally solid in the "multiple carnegie-medal winner" sense

i directed cozen to cuddy cz he wz sceptical abt the "grown-upness" and i tht he'd like the hyper-elliptical style
dr vick i gave to the earthfasts/cradefasts/candlefasts trilogy for her bday: tom i think you shd start there

BUT i wd pretty much say you pick and choose ANYWHERE and enjoy it (no more school is for 5-8 yr olds and not fantastical in any way, but i still think very funny and observant and worthwhile)

nz-ers start w. "low tide"; north americans w. "drift"

Susan Cooper's an also-ran to Lloyd Alexander, though.

I also like Cooper's more recent books about the Boggart - and she did one about William Shakespeare and time-travel that was quite fascinating.

So if I liked TDIR, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Lloyd Alexander's Pyridain (spelling?) series, what else do I need to pick-up?

How is 'A Swarm in May' (this seems to be the only book of his available in Waterstones)?

I am excited though.

this just reminded me of some series i read years ago - got the narniaesque stuff of kids stumbling into another magical world where they have to battle evil.

one scene (the only one i reember) just started looping in my head, one of the kids is battling evil person and losing when runes appear on some magical bracelet she is wearing (think they all have these bracelets) and she is able to shoot out magical beam. somehing to do with red moon or something like that maybe?

know this is not a lot of info but if anyone has any ideas what this series might be i'd appreciate it otherwise it'll be driving me nuts trying to remember.

try on amazon for cuddy? that's where i got it

I used to think that the last of the TDIR books felt like it had been randomly patched together a bit at the end of the series; but then the last time I read TDIR itself I realised that there are parts in it where Will receives visions of the pivotal scenes from the final book. I suspect it may have been heavily edited-down from a much longer draft.

It was the Moon of Gomrath specifically but i'd read both, now should i order them? are they any good (it has been 20 or more years since i read 'em)

alan garner is the author: of other books by him, elidor is better than either, ditto the owl service => red shift is sporadically brilliant but hard going

Anyone here read the 'young adult' Heinlein works, such as Red Planet and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel and so forth? I remember loving some of them and just not getting others.

Alan Garner: C or D?

(from Amazon: "Shortly thereafter, the Brollochan seizes control of Susan's body, and it is only by virtue of her bracelet, the Mark of Fohla, that it is driven off." knew there was a bracelet in there somewhere)

so while you are helping me resurrect my childhood, i was telling a friend about a film i saw as a kid in which some kid finds a little silver marble that is actually a sentient being of some sort (alien maybe), in the vein of witch mountain some evil scientist types are chasing him at the end to get it and a whole slew of these silver marble/ball things show up to save the day. (thas cheap special effects, just roll a bunch of ball bearings across the floor)

any idea what this film might be?

the main problem is that they turn out to be tremendously easily defeatable by three children and a surprisingly skills-free good witch

also slaughter maybe? and a book about a wolf after nuclear holocaust.

i always despised that kid-alone-in-wilderness stuff (in retrospect under the guise of leaving civ. behind its rilly crusoe modern bourg. self-reliance all over again) and i suppose those ones which always left the forces beyond comprehension there (i.e. sf mainly) could be the counter-trend.

also tom swift jr. (related q: did the rise of swift/hardy boys/nancy drew/three investigators etc. chain fiction happen in the uk too and was it a bad thing in either place?)

also i don't think i ever understood books about characters interacting without any weird circumstances except y'know, personal ones, until much later.

1. The Little House on the Prarie series - Laura Ingalls Wilder
2. Caddie Woodlawn
3. Johnny Tremaine
4. My Side of the Mountain
5. Bride to Terebithia
6. Where the Red Fern Grows
7. Old Yeller
8. The Henry Higgins/Ramon Quimby books by Beverly Cleary
9. Lots of stuff by Judy Blume (Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing; Then Again Maybe I Won't; Are you There God? It's Me, Margaret, etc.)
10. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler - E.L. Koinsburg

- there are more, of course. (I come from a family of grade school teachers, so, well, I am still exposed to a lot of books for children. For my birthday, this year, my sister [one of the teachers] went to a book fair at her school and bought 12 kids books for me.)

aside from the ones listed above I can only think of Madeline L'engle and the Wrinkle in Time books (which fits into the sf aspect)

Maurice Gee in particular, actually - it's still really weird fiction-wise coming to grips with him as Grim NZ Social Realist etc etc (the Plumb trilogy, etc etc) when I automatically associate him with Under The Mountain & The Halfmen Of O & so on.

I liked L'Engle's other stories/series, too, with the Austin Family and then when she brought the Austins together with the Murray/O'Keefes. Though they we're as consistently strong, I don't think. But A Ring of Endless Light was strikingly beautiful.