Barnabas (Barney) Drew: Barney is the youngest of the Drews. He loves Arthurian legends and, although he is quite wary of his talent at first, paints. In Greenwitch, Barney sketches a picture of the bay, which is later stolen by an agent of the Dark, but Merriman recovers it and presents it to Tethys as a gift. Updated review---Wow! I can't believe I read this almost 7 years ago and still haven't returned to finish the series until now. It really is a great start to a story. Once again, I loved traipsing through the Cornish countryside with Simon, Jane, and Barney. The addition to this story of some King Arthur archaeology is fantastic and still one of the points I love best about this book. I listened to it this time on audiobook, which enhanced the experience. Alex Jennings was the narrator and all I can say is it's fantastic! Needless to say, Will (who is young but Old) is on the side of the Light and so are the other children, and their great uncle “Merriman” who disappears into the twilight at the end (sorry, that’s a spoiler, though you would have guessed anyway) and is also, probably, Merlin. There’s a lot of Arthur in this sequence, but also various other mythological threads, and Herne the Hunter drops in more than once. (Herne really gets around in children’s fiction and one day perhaps someone will draw some conclusions about that.) Simon Drew: Simon is the eldest of the Drews. In Over Sea, Under Stone, Simon and Barney are the two to go into the cave and retrieve the Grail. In Greenwitch, he is jealous of Will because Merriman brought him to Cornwall for "unnecessary" reasons, but eventually warms to him. He loves sailing and anything to do with ships. As a child, I loved this book. It felt like a great journey into a magical world all around us, a journey we took through the eyes of the protagonist Will Stanton. When I recently re-read the book with my daughter, I found that it didn't quite live up to my memories of it. The sense of discovering a hidden side to our world is by far the strongest part of the novel, but reading it now I found the characters to be extraordinarily passive, particularly the main character Will. Throughout most of the novel he is drawn from place to place, and events bring to him a steady stream of allies, enemies, learning, and treasure--but we rarely see Will taking active steps to control the events around him. Even his allies seem to spend most of the novel waiting for the right time or events--almost all the initiative in this book is taken by The Dark--but we get to see them very little, and understand them even less. The result is that when you put the novel down, you may feel like you just saw an interesting landscape--but it is hard to find the conflicts in the story, or the protagonist's response to them, that could have any parallel in real life.

The writing itself is lovely. Not too fancy, and yet still describing things well. There's a real sense of ominous danger in parts of it, and yet the writing also brings across a feeling of childhood, summer vacations and sunburns and going to see the sea.Another thing which gets me is how all the people act like people. Jane and Barney and Simon get scared, they get jealous of each other, they puff themselves up and act important… The adults are indulgent, complacent. And then there’s the poetry of the quiet moments, the moon on the water and the quiet dusty attic and… Yeah. Brilliant writing. Not as compelling as the later books, but even here it’s very fine. Places, in the work of all these writers, carry auras and memories; they act both archivally and prophetically. Landscape is a palimpsest upon which ancient stories are both contested and renewed. Such ideas were powerfully formative for me as a writer, and Cooper’s presence is particularly strong in a book I wrote about walking, paths and history called The Old Ways (there’s a significant “Old Way Lane” in The Dark Is Rising).

a b Margot Adler (1 October 2007). "Author Uncertain About 'Dark' Leap to Big Screen". National Public Radio (NPR) . Retrieved 11 October 2007.So yeah. If you put Narnia, the Boxcar Children, and Indiana Jones into a blender, this would be the amazing smoothie that comes out. It was so brilliant (especially Prof Lyon, OMG) and so fun and really unexpectedly creepy. There were several points where I found myself legitimately creeped out (the bad guys were EXCELLENT bad guys). The kids acted and sounded like kids. There were a few grammatical errors, quotation marks missing and things like that, but this was overall a really cool book. Excited for the rest because I looooooove Celtic mythology. Over Sea, Under Stone isn't my favourite book of the sequence, but it's still worth reading if you can get into it for the light it sheds on the later books. while i am waiting for that,i will write a review for this book. obviously, there are going to be comparisons to that narnia series - british siblings shuttled off to a spooky house with secret passageways behind a wardrobe with an eccentric older relative and some christian mythology thrown in for funs.