I first read The Dark Is Rising in either fourth or fifth grade — I don’t remember exactly because I had the same wonderful English teacher both years, and  got so many amazing fiction recommendations. I forget why it was given and not lent to me,  but I had the paperback for years afterwards. This book is an amazing blend of myth and drama, but it also had a quick scene that stuck with me for years. Will, our hero, comes in when his older sister is chopping onions for a family meal and singing a song, and when I was ten or eleven, the idea of being able to cook AND being confident enough to sing in public seemed like the highest level of adult maturity that one could possibly reach.

Moving on.

That scene is an almost impossibly tiny moment in an epic story.  Unlike some other middle-grades fiction, I thought this held up really well. (I reread a bunch of Madeleine L’Engle recently, and was put off by the heavy classism.) There are really two storylines in The Dark Is Rising, one about a boisterous Welsh family over Christmas holidays, and the other about time travel and British myth.  On the night before Will’s eleventh birthday, odd things begin to happen and odd people appear in their small Welsh village. He discovers that he’s an Old One, and begins to take on the responsibilities and learn the abilities, as the Dark rises and the extremely heavy snow keeps falling. The two stories blend well and create a world where magic is constantly just around the corner.