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by Susan Cooper
A boy discovers his magical destiny and sets off on a vital mission to defeat the Dark in the Newbery Honor–winning second installment of Susan Cooper's epic The Dark Is Rising Sequence, now with a brand-new look!
The day before Will Stanton's eleventh birthday, he notices strange omens on his family farm: a cryptic gift, a terrifying flock of birds, and a deep, cold fear that emerges from the darkness. When he wakes on his birthday—also Midwinter Day—Will has the life-changing revelation that he is the last of the Old Ones, immortals who fight to keep the powers of evil, the Dark, from taking over the world. Will gets immediately swept away by his new destiny as he sets off in search of six magical Signs that will one day aid the Old Ones in the final battle between the Light and the Dark. But the Dark has dispatched its own agent in pursuit: the rider—evil cloaked in black, mounted on a midnight stallion. As evil looms ever closer, Will must find the Signs of wood, bronze, iron, water, fire, and stone before the Dark begins its dreadful rise.
"Susan Cooper is one of the few contemporary writers who has the vivid imagination, the narrative power, and the moral vision that permit her to create the kind of sweeping conflict between good and evil that lies at the heart of all great fantasy. Tolkien had it. So did C. S. Lewis. And Cooper writes in the same tradition." —Psychology Today
This information about The Dark Is Rising (2) (The Dark Is Rising Sequence) was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Susan Cooper is one of our foremost fantasy authors; her classic five-book fantasy sequence The Dark Is Rising has sold millions of copies worldwide. Her books' accolades include the Newbery Medal, a Newbery Honor, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, and five shortlists for the Carnegie Medal. She combines fantasy with history in Victory (a Washington Post Top Ten Books for Children pick), King of Shadows, Ghost Hawk, and her magical The Boggart and the Monster, second in a trilogy, which won the Scottish Arts Council's Children's Book Award. Susan Cooper lives on a saltmarsh island in Massachusetts, and you can visit her online at TheLostLand.com.
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