Unicorns Against Nuclear War: A Swiftly Tilting Planet
Perhaps dissatisfied with the novels she had written about the children of Meg and Calvin O’Keefe, in 1978 L’Engle again turned to the Murry family for another novel featuring dazzling trips through time and space, this time on the back of a unicor...
This Title May Be Misleading: Dragons in the Waters
Dragons in the Waters, the second book in the O’Keefe family series, is, like its predecessor, a tale of suspense, intrigue and murder mingled with a touch of fantasy and science fiction, as Poly and Charles O’Keefe meet the 13-year-old Simon Renie...
Fighting Nothingness: A Wind in the Door
Some years after writing The Arm of the Starfish, Madeleine L’Engle decided to write a more direct sequel to her visionary novel, A Wrinkle in Time. Set about a year after the previous adventure, A Wind in the Door is both a larger and smaller book t...
Intrigue and Lasers in Manhattan: The Young Unicorns
Technically, The Young Unicorns is the third book in Madeleine L’Engle’s Austin series. But in it, the Austins take a decidedly supporting role, and Vicky’s first person narration has been replaced with a third person narrative that flits from on...
Espionage and Morality: The Arm of the Starfish
After playing with coming of age stories, science fiction, and warm family tales for young adults, for her next book, The Arm of the Starfish, author Madeleine L’Engle decided to try a new type of story, a thriller combining espionage and some scienc...
Growing Up, or Not: The Moon By Night
In 1959, Madeleine L’Engle and her family took a camping trip across the United States. The trip proved remarkably beneficial to L’Engle’s writing career: not only did she conceive of A Wrinkle in Time during the journey, but the trip also provid...
Science, Religion, Wonder: The Glorious Impossible
The Glorious Impossible (1990) is Madeleine L’Engle’s retelling of the life of Christ. Intended for children, and illustrated with reproductions from the Scrovegni Chapel frescos in Padua painted by Giotto di Bondoni in the late Middle Ages, the re...
There is Such a Thing as a Tesseract: A Wrinkle in Time
Some misunderstood teenagers need to find their own way in life.Some are fortunate enough to do this while traveling through space and time.A Wrinkle in Time, probably Madeleine L’Engle’s most famous novel, and certainly one of her most profound an...
Explorations of Family: Meet the Austins
In 1960, Madeleine L’Engle published Meet the Austins, the first book in a series she would continue to write for 34 years. Largely centered on the insecurities and uncertainties of its protagonist, Vicky Austin, the warm, loving family series would ...
The First Explorations of Love: Camilla
Sometimes, one of the very hardest things about growing up is finally seeing your parents for who they really are. Sometimes, that process just happens to intersect with another hard part of growing up: falling in love for the first time.Camilla was Ma...
The Development of a Heroine: And Both Were Young
After Madeleine L’Engle delivered the manuscript of And Both Were Young to her publishers in the late 1940s, they asked her to remove material “inappropriate” for a teenage audience. She did so, an early step in a career that would soon be focusi...
Introducing the Madeleine L’Engle Reread
Madeleine L’Engle was a relatively successful author of mainstream young adult fiction before she wrote the astonishing novel A Wrinkle in Time, a work of science fiction that managed to combine mathematics, space travel, angels, friendly singing bea...

