A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978)

My favorite Madeleine L'Engle book! ( )

I thought this book was much closer to A Wrinkle in Time than the one that comes between them. As a result, I enjoyed a lot more. It was a bit confusing in a couple of places, but not too much. Over all, I thought it held together pretty well. ( )

The ending was good, but the middle was a bit slow for me. It is clever the way she pulled it all together...hence the end being good. I think I also disliked that Meg and Calvin were all of the sudden grown and married with a baby on the way. It was a pretty big jump, I would have liked them to have been more a part of the story. Especially Calvin, they conveniently got rid of him! ( )

I was so scared, growing up. This is one of the books I clutched to my heart like a lifeline.

So the plot's absurd, the dialogue stilted and the unicorn laughable. I don't care any more now than I did then. The core message is that there's hope- and that hope can come from the most unlikely sources. There's a solemn joy that underlies so much of L'Engle's work but never more than here.

Again, as an adult I see how steeped in Christianity L'Engle's work is, but it's okay. It's not like Orson Scott Card's preachifying- but more like the bones of the world as L'Engle saw it.

( )

3.5 stars. This book turned out pretty well. I love Madeleine's use of words. "Might-have-beens"... Such an interesting premise.

Yes, I got really really really really pissed off during the middle of the book, and had to take a couple days off. In Charles Wallace's adventures, he ends up in a place a lot like Salem, Massachusetts. What can I say? Closed-minded, illogical hypocrites piss me off. How anyone back them could persecute "witches" and call themselves Christian is completely beyond me.

But really, that just goes to show what a good job Ms. L'Engle did in setting up the premise of the story, such that we cared about the characters enough to become completely indignant over their persecution. And it would be one thing if the entire book was fictional (which it IS), but it's based in actual historical events!

In fact, this entire book wasn't as OUT THERE as the others. I mean, it was. I thought it was as I was reading it. There were all sorts of mystical/magical things going on (not including the unicorn)... but it was more like what you would think of as cultural legends. If it weren't for said unicorn and the bits with the time traveling and taking over other people's bodies... and the kything, of course... It would all be fairly believable.

So, while the book WAS out there, it was the most believeable of the first three books, in my opinion. Which is why it pissed me off. In the first book, the bad guy was "evil" sort of in general. Evil that was surrounding a planet that they had to save their father from. In book 2, the bad guy were Echthroi, or what I would probably call evil spirits. Still very obtuse. But this book... the bad guys were PEOPLE. And that evokes a stronger feeling than the other two. ( )