The Dark is Rising

[Amy Z]

I just finished reading The Dark is Rising sequence, which I'd never 
heard of until people on this list recommended it, even though it was 
around when I was a kid.  I liked the books, but feel a strange 
dissatisfaction.  It comes down to a couple of things:

-I don't really feel as if I got to know the characters as well as 
I'd have liked.  'Round about the middle of The Grey King I started 
to feel like I knew Will.  I liked him from the very start, but 
getting to know him was a process of dribs and drabs, and now I'm at 
the end and only barely glimpsed what he was like.  Jane is the only 
other character I come close to feeling like I know, and she's even 
more elusive than Will. 

-Especially in the Will pieces of the story, things just seem to 
happen without prelude or explanation.  This was most exasperating in 
The Dark is Rising, which is the first one I read (having been misled 
by the overall title into thinking it was #1) and which, despite 
drawing me in, kept making me ask, "How does he KNOW what to do?"  He 
always seems to.  I know he just knows 'cause he's an Old One, but 
that's unsatisfying to me as a reader.  If he's going to have this 
mysterious knowledge drop on him, I want to at least know how the 
ordinary-kid side of him feels about that.  Isn't it bewildering? 
scary? exciting?

The same thing cropped up a lot in Silver on the Tree.  It's filled 
with beautiful, rich symbolism, but the symbols seem to rise out of 
nowhere and disappear into nowhere, and I don't get their connection 
to each other (fountain, tree, castle, train . . .).  However, Bran 
and Will had a verse to guide them, so at least I had some sense of 
how =they= were making sense of what they encountered.

Would this all hold together better if I had the slightest clue about 
Arthurian legend?  I've never read any at all, despite my dad urging 
T.H. White on me all my life.  Now, however, I'm going to check it 
out.

Some of my favorite bits were with the Stantons.  I loved the 
family.  Again, something I wanted more of . . . 

Amy Z