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The Dark is Rising and Greenwitch - Susan Cooper
One thing I've been wanting to do for a while now is reread these books, which I haven't read since I was a kid, and December seemed like a good time due to The Dark is Rising taking place around Solstice/Christmas/New Year's. I had conflicted feelings of enjoyment and non-enjoyment about these books when I was a kid - and it turns out I still do! Which I will get to in a minute.
Before I get to that, though ... I was this many years old (and halfway through Greenwitch) when I realized that The Dark is Rising is not actually the first book in the series, and that sure was a discovery.
One reason why I've kept these books all these years is because I have a slipcased edition that I was given when I was a kid. It's this set - four books, from The Dark is Rising to Silver on the Tree. I think half the reason why I hung onto them despite not being *that* into the series is just because I liked the cover art, ink and watercolor fantasy illustrations, very much a style I enjoy.
But this set starts with The Dark is Rising, and the four books in the set are the only books listed on the inside.
I do actually even have the actual first book - Over Sea, Under Stone. I must have picked it up at some point, probably in a used bookstore, as a "oh hey, this is related to a series I already have" kind of thing, but had vaguely osmosed that it was a loosely related prequel written later. As far as I know, I've never read it.
ANYWAY. So I hit Greenwitch and had the experience I vaguely remember from reading these books as a kid, which is that suddenly you're with a different set of characters and it takes a while to get oriented. This time around, reading it with an adult's analytical awareness, I was noticing that Greenwitch is *clearly* set after a Kids' Own Adventure type of caper that we don't actually see on-page, we're just told about it as backstory. Bold choice, Susan Cooper! I thought. I've never seen a kids' author do that before, but we've all read enough of these types of books that we can basically fill in the blanks. Very bold choice, I like it.
Then I got to wondering if the other book I had, which I had assumed was like, a generation earlier and the kids' parents or something, was actually that adventure which she had gone back and written later because readers were curious about it. Then I looked at the publication dates and realized that Over Sea, Under Stone was actually written before any of the others ...
The thing is, it is actually a tough choice and I can see why the '80s publisher went with the order they did. The Dark is Rising is, quite frankly, just a better first book. (I'm about halfway through Over Sea, Under Stone now. I'm enjoying it, but it is very Kids' Own Adventure, and on top of that, from a modern reader perspective, it starts with an extended sequence with the kids playing "explorers escaping hostile natives" that really didn't age well.) The Dark is Rising is considerably more vivid and epic, and it introduces the main conflict in the series right away. Those first few chapters, with the signs and portents, and Will wandering alone on his birthday in a snowy, magical world, hooked me utterly as a kid and still have a lot of personal resonance.
If you start with the actual first book, then the next book plunges you straight into a different set of characters and a very different, more epic fantasy sort of feel. At the same time, I can now see why The Dark is Rising seems to imply that you're supposed to recognize some of the people Will runs into - because you would have met them in the previous book!
If it were up to me to arrange the series in some kind of official order for a new reader, I think I'd probably start with Dark is Rising and then go to Over Sea, Under Stone next, and *then* Greenwitch so you already know who the kids are when you get to it. But it'd still be a tonally jarring experience, possibly even more so than going from Dark is Rising to Greenwitch, which was still very weird. (And it doesn't help that Greenwitch is, IMHO, simply not a very strong book. I'm enjoying the Drew kids a lot more in their first adventure than I did in Greenwitch, in which they were mostly jerked around and had their memories erased while other people had most of the adventures.)
But yeah, so basically this series has two Book 1's with different sets of characters and a different tone, and I can see how it would have been a thankless choice figuring out which one to start with, because either way you're going to end up with a jump into a different character set and general style (one Kids Own Adventure, one epic fantasy) when you switch between them.
Anyway, that's a lot of rambling. On to actually talking about the actual books!
The Dark is Rising
It is fascinating to me how incredibly vividly I remember the early part of the book, with the portents and the birthday and the morning in the snow - I must have read it a LOT - and how little I remember of the rest of it, though I remembered various things (the carved ornaments with the kids' initials, the various discoveries of the Signs, stuff like that) as I encountered them on the reread.
And I can actually pinpoint the exact moment at which my memory of the book stops. I remembered everything with extreme clarity right up until Will encounters the doors on the hillside, and then my memory simply stops. Reading it as an adult, I could feel my interest tank there as well. I thought he was going home, I expected him to go home, but instead he went into this fantasy place and it is absolutely fascinating to me how much I didn't care about it and wanted him to get back to the real world.
In general, I found myself floundering every time the focus left Will's family and the modern world. I really did not care about the flashbacks and journeys to magical places in this book. I was way more into the down-to-earth parts about the family farm and the Christmas and Will looking for the Signs and trying to keep the magical side of his life away from his family.
And I really did not care about the adult characters at all. This is interesting because normally in middle grade fantasy, I'm at least as into the adult characters as the kid characters, if not more so. But not in this case! I guess Cooper did a great job of making the adult characters unrelatable and unapproachable, because I can't relate to them even now that I'm an adult. (It would've helped, probably, to have read the previous book first and seen Merriman as the kids' protective and doting uncle. He really doesn't come across nearly as well in his interactions with Will.)
There was also the incredibly frustrating repeating theme of Will solving problems by either magically knowing what to do, or having an adult show up to help him - while not telling him anything useful most of the time. Like, okay, I know that just magically knowing stuff is the actual plot of this book. But it's still frustrating! Could he figure out things occasionally rather than having the answers drop magically into his brain or someone tell him what to do?
I also still remember how hard kid!me bounced off Will every time he mentally shifts into Old One Will. I wanted him to be a kid! That part, I don't mind as an adult, but I also feel like I'm a bit too old for some of the book's extremely black and white morality, and so it's a little hard to tell at what age I would have been the right age for the book. Parts of it were too adult for me to relate to as a kid, and other parts are too kiddish for me to relate as an adult. (I also kept wanting to work out the logistics of the weather way too much.)
But the stuff I liked, I still really like. This is a very resonant, magical, mythical book. I love the quest, the Signs hidden in everyday objects, and all the vivid details, the gift exchanges and family shopping and the carved tree ornaments. In spite of how un-immersive I found the shifts into high fantasy, Will's modern farm world is incredibly immersive; you can smell the pine and taste the snow.
Greenwitch
I have next to no memories of this book at all, except that I vaguely remembered the scene with Jane being able to attend the making of the Greenwitch because she's a girl. I suspect I liked this as a kid, and I suspect Jane was my favorite of the kids. She still is.
But this is just kind of a frustrating book, in which the Drew kids get jerked around a lot - for (often) no reason! I think I would've found it less frustrating if the two sets of kid protagonists (the Drew kids and Will) had encountered each other on their own and didn't know if they could trust each other or how much they could reveal. But, like - MERRY KNOWS, and Merry knows what they already know, and there is absolutely *zero* justifiable reason why Merry can't tell them a little more about each other and what's really going on, or at least let them know what it's okay to tell each other. COME ON.
At least in the one I'm currently reading (Over Sea, Under Stone) there are good reasons why Merry doesn't tell them anything, to keep them safe because they genuinely *don't* know anything, and also because (it seems to be vaguely implied) they have to do the quest on their own or it won't work. But that ship has sailed completely by Greenwitch, and there's also the fact that considerably more than half the time, the kids get sidelined or have their memories tampered with by the good guys or LITERALLY SLEEP THROUGH THE BIG FIGHT SCENE. Come onnnnnn.
I did really enjoy Jane's compassion being the thing that got them the Maguffin, and also - though I suspect kid!me would have hated this - the outside view of Will as difficult to read, kind of a jerk, and just generally weird from the Drew kids' perspective. I liked that the two groups of protagonists don't instantly bond with each other.
But on the whole, this just isn't a very good book. I can see why most of it dropped right out of my brain as a kid. It's a whole lot of people not telling each other things, and although it has a couple of nice set-pieces (the making of the Greenwitch and the arrival of the haunted ship, for example) it's not nearly as vivid as the previous book. A lot of the important stuff happens off-page. I never really felt a connection to any of the kids except Jane, including Will, who is distant and unapproachable for plot reasons but it also makes him tough to enjoy as a protagonist.
I'm reading Over Sea, Under Stone now, and that's a much better introduction to the Drew kids - as well it should be, since it was supposed to be their actual introduction!
Before I get to that, though ... I was this many years old (and halfway through Greenwitch) when I realized that The Dark is Rising is not actually the first book in the series, and that sure was a discovery.
One reason why I've kept these books all these years is because I have a slipcased edition that I was given when I was a kid. It's this set - four books, from The Dark is Rising to Silver on the Tree. I think half the reason why I hung onto them despite not being *that* into the series is just because I liked the cover art, ink and watercolor fantasy illustrations, very much a style I enjoy.
But this set starts with The Dark is Rising, and the four books in the set are the only books listed on the inside.
I do actually even have the actual first book - Over Sea, Under Stone. I must have picked it up at some point, probably in a used bookstore, as a "oh hey, this is related to a series I already have" kind of thing, but had vaguely osmosed that it was a loosely related prequel written later. As far as I know, I've never read it.
ANYWAY. So I hit Greenwitch and had the experience I vaguely remember from reading these books as a kid, which is that suddenly you're with a different set of characters and it takes a while to get oriented. This time around, reading it with an adult's analytical awareness, I was noticing that Greenwitch is *clearly* set after a Kids' Own Adventure type of caper that we don't actually see on-page, we're just told about it as backstory. Bold choice, Susan Cooper! I thought. I've never seen a kids' author do that before, but we've all read enough of these types of books that we can basically fill in the blanks. Very bold choice, I like it.
Then I got to wondering if the other book I had, which I had assumed was like, a generation earlier and the kids' parents or something, was actually that adventure which she had gone back and written later because readers were curious about it. Then I looked at the publication dates and realized that Over Sea, Under Stone was actually written before any of the others ...
The thing is, it is actually a tough choice and I can see why the '80s publisher went with the order they did. The Dark is Rising is, quite frankly, just a better first book. (I'm about halfway through Over Sea, Under Stone now. I'm enjoying it, but it is very Kids' Own Adventure, and on top of that, from a modern reader perspective, it starts with an extended sequence with the kids playing "explorers escaping hostile natives" that really didn't age well.) The Dark is Rising is considerably more vivid and epic, and it introduces the main conflict in the series right away. Those first few chapters, with the signs and portents, and Will wandering alone on his birthday in a snowy, magical world, hooked me utterly as a kid and still have a lot of personal resonance.
If you start with the actual first book, then the next book plunges you straight into a different set of characters and a very different, more epic fantasy sort of feel. At the same time, I can now see why The Dark is Rising seems to imply that you're supposed to recognize some of the people Will runs into - because you would have met them in the previous book!
If it were up to me to arrange the series in some kind of official order for a new reader, I think I'd probably start with Dark is Rising and then go to Over Sea, Under Stone next, and *then* Greenwitch so you already know who the kids are when you get to it. But it'd still be a tonally jarring experience, possibly even more so than going from Dark is Rising to Greenwitch, which was still very weird. (And it doesn't help that Greenwitch is, IMHO, simply not a very strong book. I'm enjoying the Drew kids a lot more in their first adventure than I did in Greenwitch, in which they were mostly jerked around and had their memories erased while other people had most of the adventures.)
But yeah, so basically this series has two Book 1's with different sets of characters and a different tone, and I can see how it would have been a thankless choice figuring out which one to start with, because either way you're going to end up with a jump into a different character set and general style (one Kids Own Adventure, one epic fantasy) when you switch between them.
Anyway, that's a lot of rambling. On to actually talking about the actual books!
The Dark is Rising
It is fascinating to me how incredibly vividly I remember the early part of the book, with the portents and the birthday and the morning in the snow - I must have read it a LOT - and how little I remember of the rest of it, though I remembered various things (the carved ornaments with the kids' initials, the various discoveries of the Signs, stuff like that) as I encountered them on the reread.
And I can actually pinpoint the exact moment at which my memory of the book stops. I remembered everything with extreme clarity right up until Will encounters the doors on the hillside, and then my memory simply stops. Reading it as an adult, I could feel my interest tank there as well. I thought he was going home, I expected him to go home, but instead he went into this fantasy place and it is absolutely fascinating to me how much I didn't care about it and wanted him to get back to the real world.
In general, I found myself floundering every time the focus left Will's family and the modern world. I really did not care about the flashbacks and journeys to magical places in this book. I was way more into the down-to-earth parts about the family farm and the Christmas and Will looking for the Signs and trying to keep the magical side of his life away from his family.
And I really did not care about the adult characters at all. This is interesting because normally in middle grade fantasy, I'm at least as into the adult characters as the kid characters, if not more so. But not in this case! I guess Cooper did a great job of making the adult characters unrelatable and unapproachable, because I can't relate to them even now that I'm an adult. (It would've helped, probably, to have read the previous book first and seen Merriman as the kids' protective and doting uncle. He really doesn't come across nearly as well in his interactions with Will.)
There was also the incredibly frustrating repeating theme of Will solving problems by either magically knowing what to do, or having an adult show up to help him - while not telling him anything useful most of the time. Like, okay, I know that just magically knowing stuff is the actual plot of this book. But it's still frustrating! Could he figure out things occasionally rather than having the answers drop magically into his brain or someone tell him what to do?
I also still remember how hard kid!me bounced off Will every time he mentally shifts into Old One Will. I wanted him to be a kid! That part, I don't mind as an adult, but I also feel like I'm a bit too old for some of the book's extremely black and white morality, and so it's a little hard to tell at what age I would have been the right age for the book. Parts of it were too adult for me to relate to as a kid, and other parts are too kiddish for me to relate as an adult. (I also kept wanting to work out the logistics of the weather way too much.)
But the stuff I liked, I still really like. This is a very resonant, magical, mythical book. I love the quest, the Signs hidden in everyday objects, and all the vivid details, the gift exchanges and family shopping and the carved tree ornaments. In spite of how un-immersive I found the shifts into high fantasy, Will's modern farm world is incredibly immersive; you can smell the pine and taste the snow.
Greenwitch
I have next to no memories of this book at all, except that I vaguely remembered the scene with Jane being able to attend the making of the Greenwitch because she's a girl. I suspect I liked this as a kid, and I suspect Jane was my favorite of the kids. She still is.
But this is just kind of a frustrating book, in which the Drew kids get jerked around a lot - for (often) no reason! I think I would've found it less frustrating if the two sets of kid protagonists (the Drew kids and Will) had encountered each other on their own and didn't know if they could trust each other or how much they could reveal. But, like - MERRY KNOWS, and Merry knows what they already know, and there is absolutely *zero* justifiable reason why Merry can't tell them a little more about each other and what's really going on, or at least let them know what it's okay to tell each other. COME ON.
At least in the one I'm currently reading (Over Sea, Under Stone) there are good reasons why Merry doesn't tell them anything, to keep them safe because they genuinely *don't* know anything, and also because (it seems to be vaguely implied) they have to do the quest on their own or it won't work. But that ship has sailed completely by Greenwitch, and there's also the fact that considerably more than half the time, the kids get sidelined or have their memories tampered with by the good guys or LITERALLY SLEEP THROUGH THE BIG FIGHT SCENE. Come onnnnnn.
I did really enjoy Jane's compassion being the thing that got them the Maguffin, and also - though I suspect kid!me would have hated this - the outside view of Will as difficult to read, kind of a jerk, and just generally weird from the Drew kids' perspective. I liked that the two groups of protagonists don't instantly bond with each other.
But on the whole, this just isn't a very good book. I can see why most of it dropped right out of my brain as a kid. It's a whole lot of people not telling each other things, and although it has a couple of nice set-pieces (the making of the Greenwitch and the arrival of the haunted ship, for example) it's not nearly as vivid as the previous book. A lot of the important stuff happens off-page. I never really felt a connection to any of the kids except Jane, including Will, who is distant and unapproachable for plot reasons but it also makes him tough to enjoy as a protagonist.
I'm reading Over Sea, Under Stone now, and that's a much better introduction to the Drew kids - as well it should be, since it was supposed to be their actual introduction!