Hey adolescent lit. fans! Here’s another treasure! This Newbery Honor winning book was recently dissected (Frankenstein-style) to create a movie which completely flopped. Out of fear that such a movie might somehow stain the reputation of this classic series, I felt the need to review it as quickly as possible. I have now read two of the five books in the Dark is Rising sequence, and find them enthralling and creative.
Remember when you were a kid, and you played imaginative games? Whenever the world you had created was growing old, or didn’t fit the new situation, you had an immediate solution. All you had to do was look at your friends and say, “And pretend that. . .” and you were perfectly adapted to whatever might come. You can hear the kid conversation now, something like,
“But pretend that there’s a lake of lava around us. . .”
“And pretend that I have shoes that can walk on lava, but you don’t.”
“So pretend that I can fly over the lake.”
“But pretend that the smell makes you fall, and I have to rescue you.”
Etc.
You know you’ve heard it. Susan Cooper’s strength and weakness is that she taps into this “pretend that” skill quite easily, but perhaps a little too often. Suddenly, characters have powers or downfalls which are only available/obvious when they are dramatically expedient. In an adult novel, we wouldn’t stand for it, but since this novel was clearly written for children, you can overlook a lot of what might be inconsistencies, but could otherwise be called imagination expansions. If you as a child had as much fun with the “pretend that” skill as I did, you should have a lot of fun reading these books.
