An Acceptable Time (a book review post)

Imagine for just a moment that you're the parent of a teenage girl, a very smart teenage girl who is not getting the kind of education she needs at her high school. You decide to send your daughter off to spend some time studying with your parents who happen to be genius scientists. Now... Imagine a boy, a boy you don't know from Adam, shows up at your house wanting to see your daughter. A boy, a college boy, mind you, who says he has just driven from one coast to the other for the sole purpose of seeing your daughter. Your teenage daughter who is in high school. How do you respond?

Let me tell you how you don't respond. You don't tell the boy where your daughter is and give him directions to get there without consulting your parents or your daughter. You do not NOT check to see if your daughter even knows this boy. You do not assume the boy is telling the truth that he met her when she was on a school trip to Greece as she was passing through Athens on the way to her actual destination. And, actually, we don't even know if the boy, Zachary Gray, told Polly's parents any of that. All we know is that he showed up at her grandparents' house without any kind of verification or warning that he was coming after being sent ahead by Polly's parents.

Now, imagine for just a moment that you have a teenage granddaughter who is staying with you. A boy shows up at your house who says he was sent there by your daughter and that he knows your granddaughter and would like to see her. Do you tell him where in the woods she is likely to end up from the walk she is on and send him out to wait for her? Do you not call your daughter to verify this boy's story? Of course, if you were to call your daughter (although you would find that, yes, she did send him there) you would find she has no idea from Adam who he is.

I have an almost teenage daughter and this whole scenario in An Acceptable Time deeply disturbed me. That no one bothered to verify with Polly that she knew this boy was completely insane. I don't know; maybe there are people out there who are that naive (other than L'Engle, I mean), but I've never known any of them. It was not a circumstance I could accept as even being remotely realistic, so the book plunged off the Cliff of Belief and Acceptance almost before the first chapter even got going. Then, it got bashed around on the rocks down below as I made my way through the book, before finally drowning and sinking to bottom of the Sea of Disbelief.

So Polly has this time slippage event where she's out on a walk and ends up a few thousand years in the past. She's only there for a few pages in the book before she ends up back in her own time. She tells her grandparents about it which results in more than half of the book dealing with conversations over food about how they don't believe that it happened. This might be okay except that her grandfather has been to other planets and experienced time travel. There is no rational, acceptable reason for her grandparents to spend so long clinging to the belief that she imagined it and that if they just pretend nothing happened then nothing else will happen. And they spend 200 pages doing that. The same conversation over and over about how they don't believe it.

Still, that's not even the most annoying thing about the book. Evidently, for all of L'Engle's "science" in this series, she was one of those people who believe that the Earth is only 5000 years old. Polly (supposedly) has gone 3000 years into the past, and she keeps noticing how young the mountains look. How tall and jagged and un-eroded, because in her own time those mountains have been worn down (by just the wind and rain, mind you) into hills. Maybe L'Engle missed that part of geology where you learn that that kind of erosion takes hundreds of millions of years... well, to actually get down to the point where a mountain has been eroded from a mountain to something that is just a hill would probably take billions of years at least. And L'Engle mentions the ice age and talks a lot about glacial rocks, but it's really unclear when this age she talks about is supposed to have happened.

Basically, L'Engle mixes in just enough science talk to fool kids into believe her books know something about science but, at best, her mumbo jumbo is pseudoscience and, at worst, it's all a part of her "all you need is love" philosophy, which, again, is what saves the day at the end of this book. Not anything the protagonist does because, mostly, what she does is hangs out waiting to be sacrificed and hoping someone will save her. In fact, the only action Polly takes to get herself out of the mess she is in, she undoes. On purpose! And, then, goes back to waiting to be rescued.

And I haven't even talked about the part when the young man she's infatuated with says right in front of her that he intends to sacrifice her so that the Mother will send rain and, instead of being freaked out and trying to get away from him, she starts trying to convince herself that he would really never do that. I'm sorry, but that's messed up and a horrible message to send to young girls.

My final analysis is that this series is, well, horrible. I would never recommend them to anyone and am sorry that I ever did. I'm glad that I re-read Wrinkle and went on to read the rest just so that I will no longer recommend anything by L'Engle to any of my students. And, while I can understand a liking for Wrinkle, I honestly don't understand how anyone can like Many Waters or An Acceptable Time. I can barely make allowances for A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet and that's only because she uses the same characters as from Wrinkle and there's a flying horse.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet (a book review post)

My first ever oral book report was on A Swiftly Tilting Planet. I chose it because I had so much enjoyed the book. And, hey, it had a flying unicorn. I got an A on the written report; I didn't do so well on the oral presentation. I never let that happen again, though. It was what you call "a learning experience."

Three books into reading (and re-reading) L'Engle's Time Quintent and I'm finally realizing what it is, exactly, that I don't like about them. The characters don't do anything. They spend their time being taken from place to place by various cosmic beings because they're so important but, in the end, they don't actually do anything to affect the outcome of the story. The closest we get to anyone doing anything is Meg in A Wrinkle in Time in which she says the magic words of "I love you" to her brother to break the spell he's under. A Swiftly Tilting Planet is the worst offender so far.

There will be spoilers.

The world is on the brink of a nuclear war and Charles Wallace is tasked to stop it. He has one day to do it. One day to figure out how to get the madman who is about to start the war to change his mind and not. A madman who is on a completely different continent.

Luckily for Charles, a unicorn shows up to help him and his sister's mother-in-law gives him a magical poem to say. L'Engle relies a lot on magic words in these books. Just say the magic words at just the right time and the day is saved! That's what happens in Wrinkle, and that's what happens in this book. Every time anything bad is happening, the poem is recited and everything is better.

But let's get back to Charles and the unicorn. The unicorn, as it turns out, has wings that come out of his sides. When Gaudior, the unicorn, is just standing around, he has no wings. It's probably a personal bias, but the whole thing with the wings just seems silly to me. The unicorn, by the way, uses his wings, mostly, to fly through time; he's no good at flying through space, according to him.

To stop the madman, the unicorn takes Charles travelling through time. Now, you'd think that would be because Charles is supposed to change something to stop the madman, but, no, actually, Charles is just there to go "Within" different characters and observe. Maybe he'll learn something with which he can stop the crazy dude from blowing up the world. So that's what we spend the book doing, travelling through time learning the history of Crazy Dude's family.

Now, the special, magic poem has been in the family for ages (Meg's mother-in-law is from the same family), so, mostly, we just watch people get into bad situations and recite the poem to fix everything. But, evidently, nuclear war is too big for a poem. We travel along until we get to the father of the madman. What we learn along the way is that he has the wrong father. Or grandfather? At any rate, the wrong man married the woman and, so, we get a madman that wants to blow up the world.

It turns out that the wrong man married her, because he killed the other guy. The two men were fighting over the woman, and the bad guy stabbed the good guy and threw his body off a cliff. Charles Wallace ends up in the same time as the two guys who will fight over the woman, but is he put in a place to affect any kind of change over the outcome? No. He's put into a guy thousands of miles away. A guy who is dying of, probably, tuberculosis.

So, when it comes to the point of the fight, the guy that Charles is in is in the middle of a fevered sleep, and Charles, making his first effort to affect change in the time he's in, keeps whispering in the guy's head, "Do something." The thing is, there's no way for either of them to know that the fight on the cliff is happening at that moment; they just do. But the sick guy can't wake up and they're thousands of miles away, so they do absolutely nothing. But the outcome of the fight changes anyway. The good guy turns to find the guy trying to stab him, knocks the knife out of his hand, and the bad guy, in an effort to catch his knife, falls off the cliff. So the good guy marries the woman, and the madman is never born.

Of course, when Charles Wallace gets back, no one knows anything about the imminent nuclear war. Only he (and Meg, a bit) can remember what almost happened.

Needless to say, I was very dissatisfied with the ending of the book. Actually, I was dissatisfied with most of the book despite the fact the some of the historical bits are interesting. What the book reminded me of is kids playing on a playground and shouting "magic words" to win their battles against imaginary enemies. So, again, I am left with the impression that these are really kids' books, not like, say, The Chronicles of Narnia at all, books that you can revisit throughout your lifetime.

Except that, well, past Wrinkle, my kids have really struggled to read these. My younger son wasn't able to get past the first couple of chapters of A Wind in the Door despite that he tried twice, and my daughter started Swiftly something like four times and just couldn't get interested in it. Maybe, they're already too old. What I do know is that if I had re-read these before handing them to my kids to read, I wouldn't have bothered to do it. Beyond a few concepts, like the tesseract, I haven't really found anything worthwhile in the books.

[Which isn't going to stop me from finishing the series, because I'm already halfway through book four (and it's even worse).]

A Wrinkle in Time (a book review post)

So here we are back visiting another book from my childhood. Here's the background:

I first read A Wrinkle in Time when I was about 10,

fourth or fifth grade; I loved it. The idea of a tesseract, a wrinkle in space and time, was just... it was amazing! I think, really, the book began and ended there. Okay, not quite; I also loved when they wrinkled onto the 2-D planet. And I think my friends and I tried to bounce all our balls in unison at least once or twice to mimic the kids on Camazotz. My nostalgia for this book says it's great.

At the time I read it, I didn't know there were more books and, then, the next book I got a hold of was A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the third in the series. I did my first oral book report on that book but, now, I don't remember anything about it. The book, not the report. The report went... poorly. It was my first lesson in public speaking, and I never let nerves get the better of me again after that. At any rate, I never read A Wind in the Door and didn't even know there were two more books in the series until recently when we were getting them for my daughter. So, see, I thought, "Hey, I never read some of these and don't really remember much about the two I did read, but I loved Wrinkle when I was a kid, so I'll just read them all now!"

Which may have been a mistake...

A Wrinkle in Time did not live up to my memories of it. Not even close. The book does a lot of things that I just can't stand, now, as a reader, although I can understand the attraction of the book to kids, and I would still recommend it for kids not yet out of middle school. It does, after all, have some amazing concepts in it; they just don't make up for the places the book fails me as an adult reader.

My biggest issue with the book is the withholding of knowledge. Specifically from Meg. It's one thing to withhold from the reader, but I'm overtired of the whole thing where the characters in books (or movies) who have information withhold it from those who don't for no good reason. And there is no good reason in Wrinkle. Meg is constantly asking questions, and Charles Wallace, her mother, and the Ws just don't answer her. Frequently, it's passed off as "there's not time for that, right now," but, then, they spend tons of time just not doing anything in which those questions could have been answered. If you don't want to reveal the answers to your character, don't have your character asking the questions.

Beyond that, though, there are too many other unanswered questions. [There will be spoilers.] Questions like:
Why do the "witches" care if Mr. Murry gets rescued? The vague answer in the book is not sufficient.
If the "witches" do care, why did they wait so long? Ostensibly, I suppose this is because he was finally going to "break," but I don't really buy that. Why wait that long?
Why didn't IT just take care of the children? There's no good reason for allowing them to roam around.
Why is Charles Wallace hanging out with the giant brain when Meg goes back for him? No one else is hanging around with the giant brain, so why is Charles Wallace even still there?
Why are the "witches" stealing blankets and messing around with an abandoned house at all if they are just going to leave at the end of the story? None of that stuff made any sense at all.

I could go on.

Another thing I have really come to dislike: the giving of "gifts" that will help the heroes but not telling them how to use those gifts. How dumb is that?
"Here's a red button. Only push it if you really need to."
"What does it do?"
"I can't tell you that."
"How will I know when to use it?"
"I can't tell you that."
So Meg's usage of the spectacles that were given to her were less used as a "last resort" than as a "well, I can't think of anything else to try."
As a plot device, this ploy is rather lame.

The last major issue for me is the rather arbitrary behavior of some of the characters. Okay, mostly Meg. Specifically, the scene near the end when she's mad at her father then suddenly isn't. After spending years working with teens (and just knowing about people) that's how absolutely no one behaves, especially teens. But it's the arbitrary behavior of the "witches" that bothers me most, because, really, none of it makes any sense.

Now, I can see the attraction of all of that for 10-14 year old. I think frequently their worlds do look pretty arbitrary, so they don't question any of these behaviors; I certainly didn't when I read the book at that age, but, as an adult, an adult that knows that there generally are causes and reasons for things, I was left unsatisfied.

Basically, reading this book now, it feels to me like a skeleton of a book. Like it was the draft that L'Engle didn't go back to to flesh out. Or, maybe, it was the need to keep it at an appropriate length (as deemed by the publisher) to be desirable for the intended audience. All I know is that it needed more for me, now, as an adult then it needed for me, then, as a kid. Which is a significant point since the book is aimed, generally, at middle grade readers. It does leave me feeling somewhat ambivalent about the book overall, though. I will be continuing on in the series, though, so I'll let you know how those go as I get to them.