How to use this Page

A Ring of Endless Light. by Madeleine L'Engle. 1980. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 324 pages. ISBN:  9780374362997

My feelings about the last three Madeleine L'Engle books that I have read have ranged from lukewarm disinterest to all-out hatred, so I was almost nervous to pick up another one. Thankfully, though, A Ring of Endless Light, published in 1980, made me fall in love with L'Engle's writing all over again. Vicky Austin is almost sixteen, and she is struggling to make sense of death. A family friend, Commander Rodney, has died trying to save a drowing teen, and Vicky's own grandfather is dying of leukemia. Vicky also spends time with Zachary Grey, the troubled young man she first met in The Moon By Night, Adam Eddington, who works with her brother John at a marine biology research station, and Leo Rodney, whose feelings for Vicky are far more romantic than hers for him. As her grandfather's condition deteriorates, Vicky comes to terms with the idea of death and works to sort out her feelings for each of the young men who desire her affections.

Because I have such an affinity for realistic fiction, it comes as no surprise that my favorites among the L'Engle books I've read have been the ones about Vicky Austin and her family. My love for this particular book, though, extends beyond just a genre preference. There is plenty of science fiction in A Ring of Endless Light, including references to farandola, discussions of Adam's role in Dr. O'Keefe's regeneration research, and the discovery that people can communicate with dolphins telepathically. The difference between this book and A Swiftly Tilting Planet or A Wind in the Door is that I connect better with Vicky's emotions than with Meg's or Charles Wallace's. Meg and Charles Wallace always feel like characters, whereas Vicky sometimes feels like a real person who has the experiences of a real teen.

There were moments in this book where I felt it was necessary to suspend my disbelief a little bit. It seemed unlikely to me that several people connected to one family would die or come so near to death in such a short time. I also thought the way Zachary Grey was brought into the story was maybe a bit too coincidental, and I wondered if it was necessary to create a connection between him and Commander Rodney's death. Even so, the way these events are described, and the way they work together to further the plot, is exceptional. Whereas in A Swiftly Tilting Planet, I felt that L'Engle made all the connections between the characters too obvious, A Ring of Endless Light is written with more subtlety, and even if the events of the story are unlikely, the overall narrative is more believable.

I am nearly finished reading L'Engle's Murry/O'Keefe and Austin books. Next up is A House Like a Lotus, and after that, only Many Waters, An Acceptable Time, and Troubling A Star are left.  I'm hoping these last few books will be as enjoyable as A Ring of Endless Light, or at least not as dismal as A Swiftly Tilting Planet.

I borrowed A Ring of Endless Light from my local public library. 

For more about this book, visit Goodreads and Worldcat. 

Display Comments Add a Comment

A Swiftly Tilting Planet. by Madeleine L'Engle. 1978. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 288 pages. ISBN: 9780374373627

A Swiftly Tilting Planet is the third book in Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quintet. Based on comments here and on Goodreads, I expected to like this book, but I can’t believe how disappointing it was.

It is Thanksgiving, and a pregnant Meg Murry is celebrating the holiday at her parents’ house with all of her brothers and her mother-in-law, Mrs. O’Keefe, while Calvin is away at a conference. The phone rings and Meg’s father receives the news that Mad Dog Branzillo is about to wage nuclear war on the world. Mrs O’Keefe, who is typically not very social, suddenly turns to Charles Wallace, recites an Irish rune, and informs him that he must be the one to save the world from nuclear destruction. Charles Wallace wanders out to the star-watching rock, and meets Gaudior, a flying unicorn who will help Charles Wallace travel through time and go “within” various members of Mad Dog Branzillo’s family. If he can find out where one of them went wrong, he should be able to keep Mad Dog Branzillo from blowing things up. In the meantime, so as not to be left completely out of the action, Meg lies in bed with a newly found dog and kythes with Charles Wallace.

There are so many problems with this book that I find it hard to even summarize it without making fun of it. Some of them are minor - such as the fact that the government would call Mr. Murry to tell him the world’s about to blow up, and he would react so calmly and matter-of-factly, and carry on with Thanksgiving dinner, or the fact that Meg, formerly our heroine, is such a passive part of the plot, lying in bed and watching from a distance. I probably could have ignored just these small issues, but there is a whole host of major flaws that make it impossible for me to enjoy the story on any level.

Time travel, for example, is suddenly the easiest thing in the world. Just jump into the wind and let it take you where it wants you to go! A Wrinkle in Time spent time building Meg’s world and explaining how tesseracts operate. To suddenly describe time travel like it’s no big deal cheapens its significance in the first book of the series. I will admit that I’m not naturally a fantasy or science fiction reader and that I don’t like being asked to suspend my disbelief, but this just seems like lazy writing.

Names are also an issue. Every character in Mad Dog Branzillo’s family line has a name that is a variation on someone else’s name from the past. This is obviously meant to highlight the connections between generations, which is interesting, but it takes Charles Wallace, a child genius, nearly the entire novel to figure out that these names are all connected, while I had it figured out very early on. It’s fine to throw in all these connections; it’s silly to assume that the reader won’t notice them, or that Meg and Charles Wallace would need a long time to decode them. The story should not hinge so heavily on a revelation that is right in front of us the whole time.

Even Mrs. O’Keefe’s rune poem started grating on my nerves. Phrases like “the snow with its whiteness” and “the rocks with their steepness” sound very childish, and I had a hard time buying into the idea that reciting these words could have any impact on anything. I understand L’Engle’s desire to connect the natural world to the events and people of the world, but there isn’t enough in the story to explain how steepness, whiteness, deepness, or starkness actually help Charles Wallace. This rune is apparently based on an Irish prayer called St. Patrick’s Breastplate, which makes me wonder why L’Engle didn’t just use the original instead of writing her own.

I am so glad to have this book behind me. Thank goodness this isn’t the first L’Engle book I ever picked up, and or it most assuredly would have been my last. A Wrinkle in Time is a wonderful book, but so far none of the others in the quintet have been able to live up to it. I’m very glad that the next book on my list is A Ring of Endless Light. After all this time being irritated by the Murry O-Keefes, I’ll be thankful to be back amongst the Austins.

I borrowed A Swiftly Tilting Planet from my local public library. 

For more about this book, visit Goodreads and Worldcat. 

Add a Comment

A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'Engle. 1973. Square Fish. 240 pages. ISBN: 9780312368593

I have to be in a certain mood to read L’Engle’s books about Meg Murry, which is why it took me a while to get to the next one on my list, A Wind in the Door. The story opens with one of the most memorable lines in children’s literature: “There are dragons in the twins’ vegetable garden.” Charles Wallace is indeed seeing strange creatures in the garden, but that’s the least of his troubles. He’s also being bullied at school where the principal, Mr. Jenkins, fails daily to protect him, and he might be suffering from a disease of his mitochondria, which are endangered by something called farandolae. Meg is very worried about Charles Wallace, so when she is approached by a being named Blajeny, who calls himself a Teacher, and assigned to be partners with a cherubim (a singular being so large he is basically plural) named Proginoskes in the completion of three tests, she accepts the challenge and follows her new allies on a quest to save Charles Wallace and many others from being unnamed by the evil Echthroi.

I give Madeleine L’Engle a lot of credit for being able to keep all of these strange words, beings, and places straight in her mind, because even trying to summarize her books gets tricky quickly! I was iffy about this one at the start - it’s difficult for a realistic fiction reader like me to settle into worlds where large dragon-looking cherubim appear in gardens! Once I did get my bearings, though, I enjoyed reading of Meg’s high-stakes struggle against evil. The concept of naming someone or something in order to show one’s love for it really appealed to me, as did the separation of acts of love from feelings of love. The concept of kything as a means of silent communication is also interesting, and I like the way it adds this subtle layer of closeness to Meg’s relationship with Calvin.

At times, I felt that this book really came close to being too mushy and emotional, but for the most part it walked the line fairly well between too much and just enough. As in A Wrinkle in Time, it’s hard not to consider the religious themes and implications of the story, and I appreciate L’Engle’s willingness to continually take on those big issues. I’m also hugely impressed that she could do so much with a setting - Charles Wallace’s mitochondria - where everything is immersed in darkness and no one moves physically. Everything that happens in the characters’ minds is so interesting and dramatic, and much happens even when it seems like almost nothing is happening. I enjoyed it, too, when L’Engle starts writing in free verse toward the end of the book. I may be a bit more cynical now than I was as a teen, so my reaction was a little bit snide after a while, but I know my fifteen year old self would have related strongly to those sections.

I have read A Wind in the Door once before - in library school- and I remembered it as the best book of the Time Quintet. I didn’t have the same reaction this time, but I did like it, and I plan to continue on with my L’Engle reading list until it’s done. Next up is a story featuring Polly O’Keefe, Dragons in the Waters.

I borrowed A Wind in the Door from my local public library. 

For more about this book, visit Goodreads and Worldcat.

Display Comments Add a Comment

A Wrinkle In Time. by Madeleine L'Engle. 1962. Yearling. 211 pages. ISBN: 9780440498056

As I mentioned in last week’s Old School Sunday post, I’ve given myself the task of reading all of Madeleine L’Engle’s Murry-O’Keefe and Austin novels in their original publication order. I don’t promise to read all of them this quickly, but I read through the entirety of A Wrinkle In Time in one afternoon. This was my second time reading it, but it’s been 5 years or so since the first time, so much of it felt new again.

The story, as most children’s literature readers know, is of awkward, plain adolescent, Meg Murry, and her quest to find her father. With the help of strange beings known as Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, the Happy Medium, and Aunt Beast, and a popular boy from school named Calvin O’Keefe, Meg tessers through time to find him, face her own feelings of inadequacy, and bring him home.

This is the first science fiction novel I read, when I was forced to explore the genre in library school, and therefore it’s the first book that made me realize how interesting it can be to combine ordinary, everyday occurrences with the possibilities posed by scientific speculation. This book is especially significant for me, because it explores that science through a religious and spiritual lens. Madeleine L’Engle imagines a God-infused universe, in which everything has meaning, and everything communicates, but not always in terms humans can grasp. She also recognizes, above all, the power of family, the struggle to accept oneself, and the fact that sometimes, our weaknesses can become our strengths.

I think the reason the book is so popular, and cited so often as a childhood favorite, is that kids really relate to Meg’s feelings of plainness and insignificance, and that they see themselves in her actions and hope they, too, could rise to the occasion in the hour of need. It also has hints of adventure and romance that pull in readers of those genres as well.

Another thing I really liked, which I noticed mostly because I read Meet the Austins and A Wrinkle In Time back to back, is the number of similarities between these two books. Both focus on families where a father has gone away - Maggy’s is dead, Meg’s missing. Both involve a close brother-sister relationship. Meg’s affection for Charles Wallace very closely mirrors Vicky’s for Rob. I also noted that Meg’s mother is a scientist, while Vicky’s dad is a doctor, and that John Austin and Meg both fret quite a bit about fitting in at school and finding a way to feel good about their strangeness. The Tesseract, a website devoted to L’Engle’s life and work includes on its FAQ page the question, "What is Madeleine L'Engle's personal philosophy?" Part of the answer provided by site author reads, “What kinds of evil do her characters fight, and who fights them? How do her characters feel about family, God, friendship, love, and being themselves? These are all clues to the philosophy of Madeleine L'Engle.” I think the recurrence of the same themes in A Wrinkle In Time as in The Austins represents L’Engle grappling with these very questions, telling the same story from different angles in an effort to get at the truth.

Madeleine L’Engle was truly an original writer. I love her worldview, her writing style, and her religious curiosi

Display Comments Add a Comment

The Future of Us. Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler. November 21, 2011. Razorbill. 356 pages. ISBN: 9781595144911.

The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler is the story of Josh and Emma, next-door neighbors who, in 1996, are high school students just discovering the Internet. When Josh gives Emma an AOL CD-ROM, she creates an account, expecting to send and receive email and maybe instant message some people from school. What appears on her screen instead, however, is a website called Facebook, and a profile page for Emma 15 years in the future. At first, she thinks it might be a prank, but when Josh turns out to have a Facebook page as well, they realize they can actually see - and manipulate - what will happen to them as adults. Emma becomes obsessed with changing her present life to achieve better outcomes in the future, while Josh tries to embrace the future predicted by Facebook, even if it doesn’t feel exactly right. All the while, their friendship, which has been on rocky ground, goes through a roller coaster of ups and downs.

Though this book is marketed as YA, I strongly suspect that the appeal is actually to adults in their late 20s and early 30s who were themselves in high school during the late 1990s. I finished 8th grade and began 9th in 1996, and I was amused, in the early parts of the book, by the references to all the music that was popular then (Dave Matthews, Green Day, etc.) and all the technology, like cell phones and the Internet, that was brand-new. Unfortunately, the novelty of these 90s references wore off pretty quickly, as did the cute jokes about the future that were obviously meant to point out certain accomplishments or drawbacks of 21st century society.

The story’s plot, too, is not as strong as it could be. While watching the characters toy around with their fates was interesting and raised a lot of questions about what we might change if we could, the concept of Facebook was pretty much irrelevant to the story line. Josh and Emma also felt like very flat characters, and I was not at all invested in their friendship or potential romance. At times, I couldn’t even tell their voices apart, and I kept forgetting whose point of view I was supposed to be in. What kept me reading, honestly, was the possibility of finding out why these teens were given the privilege of seeing their futures, and was hugely disappointed by the neat and tidy ending that explained almost nothing.

In the end, I see this book as a novelty title, which appeals to the interests of the portion of the adult population who attended high school between 1994 and 2003. For those readers, the 90s references will be a good laugh, but the time period ultimately won’t ring true. And for teens who have always lived in a world with the Internet and social media, talk of AOL won’t mean a thing, and the weak storyline will lose their interest, even if the concept is appealing at first.


For more about this book, visit Goodreads and 0 Comments on Review: The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler as of 1/1/1900