Silver on the Tree by Susan Cooper
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
And so, my headlong, occasionally giddy, somewhat breathless rampage through The Dark is Rising sequence ends; and it ends here, with this book of almost breathless bigness and Breugel/Dali/Escher-esque overtones.
It is a heck of a series this, huge and madly inventive (though that’s wrong, it doesn’t feel as if it’s invented, it feels real, all of it, as though Cooper’s just pulled off the lid of something and let us look inside), and it is a heck of a reading experience to read them all in a gleeful, greedy rush.
So Silver on the Tree is about the coming together of things. It features Will Stanton, Bran, the Drew Children, Merriman and others, all of them being brought together to play their place in the right space and time(s). There are moments in this book where Cooper got a little too internalised, a little too lost in the vision of her world(s) which to me, still needed some clarifying in places and bringing back to the reader. But that is selfish, really, and I do read selfishly at times because in books like this, I want it all to make sense. I want to know everything and in this sequence, I have come to realise I know so very little, and every time I finish them I have hungered, somewhat blindly, for more.
And there is no more of this, this is it and this is the end, and it is is stunning and bold and so very, very big. Cooper soars, and the writing soars, and the endings and the resolution of things are soaring and stomach-turning and big, big, big.
I did it. I read a series that I think, with my content smugness of having, at last, read them, should be obligatory. It is not without failure (then again, not many narratives are), but it is replete with victories so huge and so scopey and world-changing in nature, that it is an outstanding achievement and a reality-shifting read.
Daisy May Johnson 
An eloquent paean of praise for this series. Must find time to re-visit, and soon — I think there’s a one-volume edition, isn’t there?
Many thanks! And yes, I do think there is – it’s on Goodreads as a bind up.