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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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The Moon By Night. by Madeleine L'Engle. 1963. Ariel Books. 218 pages. ISBN (for the 1981 edition): 9780440957768

The Moon By Night is the second book in Madeleine L’Engle’s Austin series, occurring roughly two years after the events of Meet the Austins. Vicky, who was then twelve, is now fourteen, and experiencing the typical doubts and growing pains associated with adolescence. In addition to her personal changes, she’s also forced to confront some serious family upheaval. Uncle Douglas has, as predicted by the family in Meet the Austins, married Aunt Elena, and Maggy, the orphaned girl who has been staying with the Austins will now move in with Elena and Douglas, who are her legal guardians. The rest of the Austins will move as well, from Thornhill, their childhood home, to New York City, where Mr. Austin has found work as a doctor. Before heading for the city, however, they take a road trip to Laguna Beach, California, where Douglas, Elena, and Maggy will make their new lives. On the way, the Austins visit well-known attractions like the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, make the acquaintance of a snide and sickly young man named Zachary Gray who does his best to woo Vicky, and share in surprising adventures involving everything from bears to flash floods. Vicky also makes her own internal, spiritual journey, as she begins to come of age.

Back in the Fall, when I reviewed Back When You Were Easier to Love, I wrote, “The right book is the one that just fits. It clicks with [the] reader in a way that makes her feel as if the book was written specifically for her. “ I haven’t felt that way about a book in a while, but I definitely did have that feeling while reading The Moon By Night. I really identified with Vicky’s journey and felt that many of her internal and emotional experiences mirrored my own. In fact, while the road trip is of course an interesting storytelling vehicle, I think the emotional journey was the more compelling aspect of this book. I like, for example, the way Vicky characterizes her need for time away from her family:

It was about time for me to be alone for a while. On a camping trip you’re falling over each other twenty-four hours a day. Most of the time it’s fine, but every so often you need to get out. You have to go off by yourself or you just stop being you, and after all I was just beginning to be me. Sometimes, like that evening at Palo Duro with the scouts yelling back and forth as if they owned the place and nobody else had a right to be there, I felt that doing nothing but be with the family was making me muffiny, though we’re not a muffiny family. So that’s not really what I mean. I guess what I mean is, I felt they were sort of holding me back, keeping me from growing up and being myself. (p. 70)

The reference to “muffins” comes from the Anti-Muffins chapter in Meet The Austins, but is also briefly explained in this book - probably due to the fact that "The Anti-Muffins" was removed from the original text and replaced later on. I love L’Engle’s understanding that a teenager can love her family and still want to be apart from them, and I loved the philosophical nature of the idea that “you just stop being you” in the presence of others

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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

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Meet the Austins. by Madeleine L'Engle. 1960; 1997. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 224 pages. ISBN: 9780374349295

I have read several Madeleine L’Engle novels as an adult, but I’ve never made my way through the entirety of any of her series. I’ve decided that the best way to remedy this situation is to read the interconnected Murray-O’Keefe and Austin novels in the order in which they were published. This means, when I do finally finish this task, I will have read Meet the Austins, A Wrinkle In Time, The Moon By Night, The Arm of the Starfish, The Young Unicorns, A Wind in the Door, Dragons in the Waters, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, A Ring of Endless Light, A House Like a Lotus, Many Waters, An Acceptable Time, and Troubling a Star. After reading Meet the Austins, I’m really looking forward to the rest.

While I associate L’Engle with science fiction, this first novel about the Austins is completely realistic. The lives of the four Austin kids - John, Vicky, Suzy, and Rob - are upset when their uncle and his co-pilot are killed in a crash, and the co-pilot’s daughter, Maggy, comes to live with the Austins. Maggy is a brat when she arrives, and it takes the family a while to warm up to her. It is only when they must face the possibility that Maggy might return to her surviving blood relatives that they realize how much a member of the family she really has become.

The chapters in this book are definitely interrelated, but each one represents one particular episode out of the Austins’ lives. Each episode highlights the strength of the sibling relationships, the devotion of the Austin parents, but also the family’s idiosyncrasies and flaws that keep them from becoming saccharine portraits of perfection. One of my favorite episodes in the entire book is when all the Austins dress up as a well-to-do family in order to scare off their uncle’s unsuitable girlfriend. Even Mr. and Mrs. Austin are in on the joke, which really makes them seem real and alive to the reader. I also think Vicky’s relationship to Rob, and the entire family’s reaction when Rob goes briefly missing, are very touching elements to the story, and very well-described.

Above all, though, the chapter which gives the most insight into the Austin family’s role in the world is one that was left out of the first published edition of the book. It’s called The Anti-Muffins, and it tells of the Austins’ club, which is based entirely on the idea that it’s undesirable to be conformist. Muffins come out of the pan all the same, but the Austins strive against that, hoping for a world where it’s okay to be a little bit strange. Also in the club is a Hispanic boy named Pablo whose family is poor. His presence is said to be the reason the chapter was originally cut from the book. But thank goodness it was put back in. I skipped it on my first read-through to see what the story was like without it. It was still very good - the vocabulary is very rich, the style very enjoyable, etc. - but something about that Anti-Muffins chapter makes the book feel whole to me. I truly wish I had read this book as a child just for that chapter.

This book has quickly become one of my favorites, and it has me completely hooked on the Austin characters. I can tell already I’m going to enjoy this little reading exercise, and especially enjoy seeing where L’Engle takes these characters in the books I've yet to read.

2 Comments on Old School Sunday: Review: Meet the Austins by Madeleine L'Engle, last added: 4/29/2012

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Enbrethiliel said, on 4/29/2012 6:07:00 AM

+JMJ+

My copy doesn't have the Anti-Muffins chapter. =( And for the longest time, I thought that The Anti-Muffins was a separate Austen novella. Would you know if all new editions include it, Katie?

I like the Austin family, too, but simply never warmed to Vicky. (Not that there's a competition or anything, but I'm "Team Meg"! =P) And my favourite Austin family novel is the one Vicky doesn't narrate. LOL! I think I would have preferred John as the narrator.

Just a few hours ago, I was reading a friend's review of the Frank Capra movie You Can't Take It With You, which also includes a scene in which a rich, snooty visitor is confronted with a poorer, more eccentric family. Your highlighting this episode in Meet the Austins reminds me that I kind of like such little clashes of culture--but only because I always identify with the eccentrics. =P I was always kind of impressed that Dr. and Mrs. Austin were so willing to play dress up and got so into their roles, but at the same time, kind of skeptical. I don't think I ever bought it, no matter how much fun I also found it.

Megan D. Neal said, on 4/29/2012 6:54:00 AM

This series was a favorite reread when I was eleven and twelve, and even into my early teens.

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