The Dark Is Rising 4/5

(Well, there goes my secret, I get all my images from amazon).

In the vein of so many children’s fantasy books, this is the first of a series and it follows a young child (Will Stanton, age 11) on a quest against seemingly insurmountable evil.  Will has found out at his eleventh birthday he is an “Old One,” a group of somehow immortal humans who are aligned with the Light and charged with keeping the Dark at bay.  Will is the last of the Old Ones and is the Seeker, meaning he must find the six signs of the Light in order to keep the Dark from gaining ultimate sway over the world.

The book follows as Will gathers the six signs and helps defeat the forces of the Dark (such as the Rider and the Walker) using the help of his fellow Old Ones.  All the time he has a strange mixture of being an eleven-year-old boy and being an immortal.

Despite how hokey the premise sounds, it is actually an engaging read as long as you don’t put too much thought into it.  There are a good number of deus ex machinas and unexplained salvations, but the book is so well written that it is not particularly jarring.  I started this book when I was about eleven and for some reason I never finished it.  Reading it now, I realize this is exactly the type of book I would have loved, having been a huge fan of John Bellairs and Madeline L’Engle.  It is important to read this with a child’s fascination with the unknown, rather than a cynical adult view, and if you do that then the idea of stepping through doors in time to gather the six elemental signs to fight the Dark becomes rather exciting.  Not only that, Cooper adds in a good number of allusions that I would not have caught as a kid.  Her writing is not pandering to children, it respects them and, at parts, is downright poetic.

Overall:  a solid read for some free time, something to throw in a bag and read and enjoy while doing laundry.  4/5