Books

After years of relegating them to mere supporting characters, L’Engle finally gave Sandy and Dennys, the Murry twins their own adventure in Many Waters. The book turned out, however, to be quite different than any of the other works in the Murry/O’...

Before I go on to discuss this week’s book, A House Like a Lotus, a quick point about the Madeleine L’Engle reread in regards to racism, homophobia and other issues.If I have seemed harsh on L’Engle on these matters — and I may well have been

“I don’t wish to be defined by gender or genitals. I am a pianist.”— Katherine VignerasHaving written novels focused on the emotional angst of young and middle aged adults, in the 1980s Madeleine L’Engle set off to write something a little di...

A Ring of Endless Light, the fourth novel in Madeleine L’Engle’s Austin famly series, opens, appropriately enough, with a funeral. I say appropriately, because this is a novel of death, and our responses to it. And also, telepathic dolphins. It is ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...