pleasure to novels already replete with intellectual enjoyment." Joel Chaston writes "Among Cooper's books for children, the Dark Is Rising series is her masterwork. The five novels in it are rich with symbolism and poetic passages. The Dark Is Rising, perhaps the best single book of the series, certainly rivals and sometimes surpasses the work of the major fantasy writers--with whose work it is frequently compared." Amelia A. Rutledge says that the series "integrates the traditional lore of the British Isles with modern concerns. Her work, although commercially designated for a younger audience, exemplifies sophisticated mythopoeic writing not limited to that age group and is one of the major contributions to Arthurian fantasy of the 1970s." Professor Michael D. C. Drout argues that Cooper makes greater "use of Anglo-Saxon source materials" than other critics have identified: "Cooper's uses of Anglo-Saxon sources are allusions that fit into a schema of history rather than (in the words of one reviewer) being merely tossed "pell-mell" into the mythical pot... It is Cooper's Anglo-Saxonism, I argue, which generates the notions of British national identity explicated in the novels, notions that contradict the author's overt political stance. In addition, Cooper's particular version of Anglo-Saxonism, with its strong focus on teaching and learning, is isomorphic to the ideology of adult/child power relations represented in the novels, an ideology that puts great weight on the value of obedience to authority. Adult/child power relations are both replicated and reinforced by two other sets of opposed terms: British/non-British and supernatural/mundane, and all of these terms are finally subsumed in Cooper's Manichaean binary, Light/Dark, leading to a closed symbolic economy which exalts personal obedience to authority and views Anglo-Saxons and their ideologies—as they were for the Venerable Bede in A.D. 771—as clearly on the side of the angels." The New York Times Book Review wrote of the novel The Dark Is Rising "This is a muscular fantasy... The writing is robust, but noticeably better out of human time than at the Stanton hearth: as if the author's style, too, had experienced a salutary, magical translation... The fantastic style is virile and, for all its paraphernalia, spare. Susan Cooper's vocabulary is athletic; the complications are dense. Her book seems to have been prepared for a special small age group: those who can read with fluency and attention, but who haven't yet been afflicted by adolescent cynicism." Film adaptation Following the successful