Look, between Susan Cooper and more obscure and arcane ways of looking at legend, gimme those books every time. I don't even need to faff around with Latin or worse, badly spelled cod-Latin from seventeenth-century England.
(I will never forget as a parent or a general human Eli's white-hot flare out of the series after adoring Over Sea, Under Stone because of strong identification with Barney; it was a good indication that he was secretly far more morally upright and staunchly just than I could hope to be.)