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Comments Off on Kate’s 2¢: “A Swiftly Tilting Planet” by Madeleine L’Engle
Kate’s 2¢: “A Swiftly Tilting Planet” by Madeleine L’Engle
“A Swiftly Tilting Planet” by Madeleine L’Engle
Madelyn Buzzard did a nice job of reading this third story in this series.
What child wouldn’t be enthralled by a young boy and a splendid unicorn, who transport through risky times and space to research the O’Keefe genealogy.
“…The world has been abnormal for so long that we’ve forgotten how to live in a peaceful and reasonable climate. If there is to be any peace and harmony, we have to create it in our home.”
“Rune: I place all Hevan and Its power; the sun with it’s brightness and snow with its whiteness; the fire with all the strength it has; and lightening with its rapid wrath; and the wind with all its swiftness along their path; and the sea with its deepness; and the rocks with their steepness; and earth with it’s darkness . All these I pace with Almighty God’s help and grace between myself and the powers of darkness.”
Meg and Charles Wallace are so mentally in touch that they are able to help each other, even though Charles Wallace is ‘within’ another’s body, in another time and place.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Madeleine L’Engle (/ˈlɛŋɡəl/; November 29, 1918[1] – September 6, 2007)[2] was an American writer of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and young adult fiction, including A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels: A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time. Her works reflect both her Christian faith and her strong interest in modern science.
Early life
Madeleine L’Engle Camp was born in New York City on November 29, 1918, and named after her great-grandmother, Madeleine Margaret L’Engle, otherwise known as Mado.[3] Her maternal grandfather was Florida banker Bion Barnett, co-founder of Barnett Bank in Jacksonville, Florida. Her mother, a pianist, was also named Madeleine: Madeleine Hall Barnett. Her father, Charles Wadsworth Camp, was a writer, critic, and foreign correspondent who, according to his daughter, suffered lung damage from mustard gas during World War I.[a]
L’Engle wrote her first story aged five and began keeping a journal aged eight.[5] These early literary attempts did not translate into academic success at the New York City private school where she was enrolled. A shy, clumsy child, she was branded as stupid by some of her teachers. Unable to please them, she retreated into her own world of books and writing. Her parents often disagreed about how to raise her, and as a result she attended a number of boarding schools and had many governesses.[6][page needed]
The Camps traveled frequently. At one point, the family moved to a château near Chamonix in the French Alps, in what Madeleine described as the hope that the cleaner air would be easier on her father’s lungs. Madeleine was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland. However, in 1933, L’Engle’s grandmother fell ill, and they moved near Jacksonville, Florida to be close to her. L’Engle attended another boarding school, Ashley Hall, in Charleston, South Carolina. When her father died in October 1936, Madeleine arrived home too late to say goodbye.[7]
Education,
L’Engle attended Smith College from 1937 to 1941. After graduating cum laude from Smith,[8] she moved to an apartment in New York City. L’Engle published her novels The Small Rain and Ilsa prior to 1942.[9] She met actor Hugh Franklin that year when she appeared in the play The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov,[10] and she married him on January 26, 1946. Later she wrote of their meeting and marriage, “We met in The Cherry Orchard and were married in The Joyous Season.”[8] The couple’s first daughter, Josephine, was born in 1947.
The family moved to a 200-year-old farmhouse called Crosswicks in the small town of Goshen, Connecticut in 1952. To replace Franklin’s lost acting income, they purchased and operated a small general store, while L’Engle continued with her writing. Their son Bion was born that same year.[11] Four years later, seven-year-old Maria, the daughter of family friends who had died, came to live with the Franklins and they adopted her shortly thereafter. During this period, L’Engle also served as choir director of the local Congregational church.[12]
Writing career
L’Engle determined to give up writing on her 40th birthday (November 1958) when she received yet another rejection notice. “With all the hours I spent writing, I was still not pulling my own weight financially.” Soon she discovered both that she could not give it up and that she had continued to work on fiction subconsciously.[13]
The family returned to New York City in 1959 so that Hugh could resume his acting career. The move was immediately preceded by a ten-week cross-country camping trip, during which L’Engle first had the idea for her most famous novel, A Wrinkle in Time, which she completed by 1960. It was rejected more than thirty times before she handed it to John C. Farrar;[13] it was finally published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1962.[12]
In 1960 the Franklins moved to an apartment on the Upper West Side, in the Cleburne Building on West End Avenue.[14] From 1960 to 1966 (and again in 1986, 1989 and 1990), L’Engle taught at St. Hilda’s & St. Hugh’s School in New York. In 1965 she became a volunteer librarian at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, also in New York. She later served for many years as writer-in-residence at the cathedral, generally spending her winters in New York and her summers at Crosswicks.[citation needed]
During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, L’Engle wrote dozens of books for children and adults. Four of the books for adults formed the Crosswicks Journals series of autobiographical memoirs. Of these, The Summer of the Great-grandmother (1974) discusses L’Engle’s personal experience caring for her aged mother, and Two-Part Invention (1988) is a memoir of her marriage, completed after her husband’s death from cancer on September 26, 1986.
On writing for children
Soon after winning the Newbery Medal for her 1962 “junior novel” A Wrinkle in Time, L’Engle discussed children’s books in The New York Times Book Review.[15] The writer of a good children’s book, she observed, may need to return to the “intuitive understanding of his own childhood,” being childlike although not childish. She claimed, “It’s often possible to make demands of a child that couldn’t be made of an adult… A child will often understand scientific concepts that would baffle an adult. This is because he can understand with a leap of the imagination that is denied the grown-up who has acquired the little knowledge that is a dangerous thing.” Of philosophy, etc., as well as science, “the child will come to it with an open mind, whereas many adults come closed to an open book. This is one reason so many writers turn to fantasy (which children claim as their own) when they have something important and difficult to say.”[15]
Religious beliefs
L’Engle was a Christian who attended Episcopal churches and believed in universal salvation, writing that “All will be redeemed in God’s fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones.”[16] As a result of her promotion of Christian universalism, many fundamentalist Christian bookstores refused to carry her books, which were also frequently banned from evangelical Christian schools and libraries. At the same time, some of her most secular critics attacked her work for being too religious.[17]
Her views on divine punishment were similar to those of George MacDonald, who also had a large influence on her fictional work. She said “I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love.”[18]
In 1982, L’Engle reflected on how suffering had taught her. She told how suffering a “lonely solitude” as a child taught her about the “world of the imagination” that enabled her to write for children. Later she suffered a “decade of failure” after her first books were published. It was a “bitter” experience, yet she wrote that she had “learned a lot of valuable lessons” that enabled her to persevere as a writer.[19]
Later years, death, and legacy
L’Engle was seriously injured in an automobile accident in 1991, but recovered well enough to visit Antarctica in 1992.[12] Her son, Bion Franklin, died on December 17, 1999, from the effects of prolonged alcoholism.[20] He was 47 years old.[21]
In her final years, L’Engle became unable to teach or travel due to reduced mobility from osteoporosis, especially after suffering an intracerebral hemorrhage in 2002. She also abandoned her former schedule of speaking engagements and seminars. A few compilations of older work, some of it previously unpublished, appeared after 2001.
L’Engle died of natural causes at Rose Haven, a nursing facility close to her home in Litchfield, Connecticut, on September 6, 2007, according to a statement made by her publicist the following day.[22] She is interred in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan.[23]
From NLS/BARD/LOC:
A swiftly tilting planet DB49606
L’Engle, Madeleine. Reading time: 7 hours, 6 minutes.
Read by Madelyn Buzzard.
Science Fiction
Charles Wallace, the youngest of the Murry children, must travel through time and space in a battle against an evil dictator who would destroy the entire universe. Sequel to A Wind in the Door (DB 41596). For grades 5-8. 1978
Downloaded: August 12, 2023
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Kate’s 2¢: “Acid Row” BY Minette Walters
“Acid Row” BY Minette Walters
I liked this story. Vanessa Maroney did a good job of narrating it for the listener.
I think this story shows how rumor and innuendo can run ramped and really turn deadly. Mix in the drugs, poverty, physical disabilities, and ill-literacy, not to mention the politicians who turn their backs on the down trodden… It is a powder keg ready to explode, which it did.
I’m delighted that big, black Jimmy James turned out to be the gentle giant and hero of the story (in my mind).
M
inette Walters was born in Bishop’s Stortford in1949 to Samuel Jebb and Colleen Jebb. As her father was a serving army officer, the first 10 years of her life were spent moving between army bases in the north and south of England. Her father died in 1960, following years of ill health from his desert service during World War II. Minette was educated through a generous Foundation Scholarship at the Godolphin School in Salisbury.
During a gap year between school and Durham University, 1968, Minette volunteered in Israel with The Bridge in Britain, working on a kibbutz and in a delinquent boys’ home in Jerusalem. She graduated from Trevelyan College, Durham in 1971 with a BA in French.
Minette met her husband Alec Walters while she was at Durham and they married in 1978. They have two sons: Roland, who is married to Charlotte, and Philip, who is married to Sarah: and three granddaughters: Madeleine, Martha and Hermione.
Minette Walters wiles away from the “cosy” confines of preconceived notions of what an English murder-mystery author should be, Minette Walters can be found, glass of wine in hand, explaining the finer details of plumbing in a larder sink…
Web bookmarks for Minette’s research can run the gamut from brain trauma to the anti-war campaign, paedophilia and racist propaganda…
And, along with husband Alec, she’s only too happy to engage in ‘full and frank’ conversations about any topic you care to name, punctuated at regular intervals by her infectious laugh…
From NLS/BARD/LOC:
Acid Row DB57205
Walters, Minette. Reading time: 11 hours, 23 minutes.
Read by Vanessa Maroney.
Mystery and Detective Stories
Psychological Fiction
The residents of a bleak housing project in England riot when they discover a pedophile is living among them and a ten-year-old girl is missing. When young Dr. Sophie Morrison is taken hostage by the pedophile, black ex-con Jimmy James attempts a rescue. Violence and strong language. 2002.
Downloaded: September 9, 2023
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Kate’s 2¢: “Above” by Isla Morley
“Above” by Isla Morley
I liked this story. Carolyn Hossfeld did a good job of narrating this for the listener.
I think it takes a special type of person to be able to live so far underground in an abandoned missile silo. How terrifying for a 16-year-old girl to be forced to live for 17-years below ground. Then, however, to learn that her capturer really did do her a back-handed favor.
www. IslaMorley.com
Isla Morley grew up in South Africa during apartheid, the child of a British father and fourth-generation South African mother. During the country’s State of Emergency, she graduated from Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth with a degree in English Literature.
By 1994 she was one of the youngest magazine editors in South Africa, but left career, country and kin when she married an American and moved to California. For more than a decade she pursued a career in non-profit work, focusing on the needs of women and children.
Her debut novel, Come Sunday, won the Janet Heidinger Prize for fiction and was a finalist for the Commonwealth Prize. It has been translated into seven languages. Her novel, Above was an IndieNext Pick, a Best Buzz Book and a Publishers Weekly Best New Book. The Last Blue is her third novel.
She has lived in some of the most culturally diverse places of the world, including Johannesburg, London and Honolulu. Now in Los Angeles, she shares a home with her husband, daughter, three cats and five tortoises.
From NLS/BARD/LOC:
Above DBC06654
Morley, Isla. Reading time: 15 hours, 3 minutes.
Read by Carolyn Hossfeld.
Suspense Fiction
Science Fiction
Psychological Fiction
Abducted and locked in an abandoned missile silo by a mad survivalist, a Kansas teen endures loneliness and despair while struggling to raise a baby in isolation before escaping into a world more changed than she anticipated. Some descriptions of sex, some strong language and some violence.
Downloaded: Au
gust 21, 2023
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by kate
Comments Off on Kate’s 2¢: “The Dead Romantics” by Ashley Poston
Kate’s 2¢: “The Dead Romantics” by Ashley Poston
“The Dead Romantics” by Ashley Poston
What a wonderful story of a unique family and the things they tolerate. Eileen Stevens did a good job of reading this story for us.
You can’t beat the great ending.
Ashley Poston is the author of Geekerella, the first book in the Once Upon a Con series. Her fangirl heart has taken her everywhere from the houses of Hollywood screenwriters to the stages of music festivals to geeked-out conventions (in cosplay, of course). When she is not inventing new recipes with peanut butter, having passionate dance-offs with her cat, or geeking out all over the internet, she writes books. She lives in small-town South Carolina, where you can see the stars impossibly well.
From NLS/BARD/LOC:
dead romantics DB108912
Poston, Ashley Reading time: 10 hours, 28 minutes.
Eileen Stevens
Humor
Supernatural and Horror Fiction
Romance
“Florence Day is the ghostwriter for one of the most prolific romance authors in the industry, and she has a problem–after a terrible breakup, she no longer believes in love. It’s as good as dead. When her new editor, a too-handsome mountain of a man, won’t give her an extension on her book deadline, Florence prepares to kiss her career goodbye. But then she gets a phone call she never wanted to receive, and she must return home for the first time in a decade to help her family bury her beloved father. For ten years, she’s run from the town that never understood her, and even though she misses the sound of a warm Southern night and her eccentric, loving family and their funeral parlor, she can’t bring herself to stay. Even with her father gone, it feels like nothing in this town has changed. And she hates it. Until she finds a ghost standing at the funeral parlor’s front door, just as broad and infuriatingly handsome as ever, and he’s just as confused about why he’s there as she is. Romance is most certainly dead . . . but so is her new editor, and his unfinished business will have her second-guessing everything she’s ever known about love stories.” — Provided by publisher. Unrated. Commercial audiobook. 2022.
Download The dead romantics DB108912