| Jan. 31st, 2012 @ 05:02 pm Review: An Acceptable Time, by Madeleine L'Engle |
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When I was a kid, I loved what was then L'Engle's Time Trilogy: A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet. The kids of the Murry family went on wonderful adventures: instant interstellar travel to a brave new world, an attempt to fix a human body from the inside a la Fantastic Voyage or Innerspace, and travels through time to remove a future threat of nuclear war was all great stuff. Several years later, my husband-to-be introduced me to Many Waters, written after the original trilogy but clearly tied to it, in which the two 'normal' siblings of the Murry family spend a year with Noah and his family. While never particularly hidden, L'Engle's connection to the Christian faith came more obviously to the forefront in that fourth book just by nature of the adventure of the twins, but both the grand adventure and the moral choices presented were happily engrossing.
A few months ago when Borders was going out of business, I spotted An Acceptable Time, discovered it was the fifth book in the Time series, and picked it up on the cheap. Sadly, L'Engle is not at her best. Young Polly O'Keefe, one of Meg (Murry) O'Keefe's children, visits her grandparents. She accidentally crosses circles of time 3000 years apart and visits a world of the distant past in which a small handful of druids from Great Britain crossed the sea and joined the American natives. So far, so L'Engle. The problems lie in several aspects ranging from poor science (albeit referred to only indirectly) to character discontinuity from previous books to having characters present that the book would have been better without.
( Read the gory details here )
Were these issues complete deal-breakers? Well, no. The story is still a page-turner, and I did generally enjoy it. But be warned that An Acceptable Time is far from L’Engle’s best work. |
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