Author: Madeleine L'Engle
Age: YA
I think this is my favorite Madeleine L'Engle, and that's not an easy choice. If you've never read any L'Engle except A Wrinkle in Time, you've been seriously missing out.
This is a book about a summer of death. If that sounds depressing, well, I'll be honest, it's pretty heavy stuff. I cried a couple times while reading it. But you can't have death without life, so it's also very much a book about life and a book with joy in it. I don't know much about L'Engle's religious background but she has a strong innate spirituality. Her religion, whatever it is, is something beautiful and something that makes sense. I've been through a summer of death and I think that makes this book mean even more to me. It really helped me through that summer, not in the sense that I read the book then--I'd read it several years before--but more that remembering the book helped me understand that death and particularly a summer of death (because deaths always seem to come in groups) is just a part of life and something that happens to everyone. And somehow knowing that, knowing that it wasn't just some strange and horrible thing that was only happening to me, made it more tolerable.
The Austin family always spends a couple weeks every summer on the Island with their grandfather. But the summer that Vicky Austin is almost sixteen is different. Grandfather has leukemia, and Vicky's dad, who's a doctor, says they'll stay for as long as he needs them. But Vicky knows her dad has to be back at work right after Labor Day, so Grandfather must not have much time left. While they're sitting around waiting for the inevitable, another death strikes first. A family friend, Commander Rodney of the Coast Guard, suffers a heart attack after rescuing a stupid rich boy who can't sail properly from drowning. So now the family has to cope with both the awfulness of the slow death that you have to watch and the horribleness of the sudden death. And there's more death to come--there always is--but no more spoilers.
I promised you there was life, too, and there is...and for a teenage girl that comes in the form of romance. There are THREE guys in Vicky's life this summer (I never understand why that happens to people in books, but I think I've ranted about it before). First, there's Leo Rodney, the oldest son of the man who just died. Vicky's known him forever but she's never been interested in him at all--but she can't just flat out reject him while he's grieving, so that's tricky. Then, there's Zachary Gray, a gorgeous but troubled rich boy who's used to doing and getting whatever he wants. He sort of dated Vicky last summer but then didn't contact her for the rest of the year, so Vicky's not sure how to feel about him showing up again out of the blue. Zachary's got his own death issues. His mom just died, and he himself has a bit of death wish...he always has. It turns out that he was the one Commander Rodney saved from drowning. If you like that Edward Cullen dark-and-broody-and-bad-for-you thing, you must meet Zachary. I'll be honest, he filled many a teenage fantasy of mine. Last but certainly not least is Adam Eddington, a marine biology student who's spending the summer doing dolphin research on the island. He works at the same lab as Vicky's older brother, John, and he gets Vicky to help him with his dolphin project. Vicky is very attracted to Adam--for his mind as much as his body--but he doesn't seem to think of her as anything more than his friend's little sister. I'm pretty in love with both Zachary and Adam.
Reading this book as a new mother, I paid more attention to the parents than I ever did before. Zachary always teases Vicky that her family is old-fashioned, but it seems to me like her parents do a pretty good job...they're there for their kids when they need them, but they also trust them a lot and give them a lot of freedom. How do you strike that balance, I wonder. It doesn't seem easy. It kind of shocks me that they let Vicky go out with Zachary--he's a lot older than she is, he's proven himself to be irresponsible and dangerous, and they don't like him at all. I can't see my parents letting teenage me date Zachary. Much as I love him now, I can't really see myself letting a daughter date someone like him. But they let her make her own decisions about him...she doesn't have to sneak out or throw any fits. And--perhaps because they trust her so much--she proves herself worthy of it. Or maybe they are wrong to let her date him and they're just lucky that nothing really bad happens. I don't know. Stuff to think about when I have teenagers, I guess.
A couple other things...there's a whole series about Vicky; this is the fourth of five books. And there are some other books in a parallel series that feature Zachary and Adam. This is by far my favorite of all of them. It seems almost blasphemous to say there are L'Engle books that I don't love, because when she's good she's so good. But it's true. The others are different--most of them are sort of spy adventure stories, which is fine if you're in the mood for that, but this is the one that's the most about the real world. Of course you can read the others if you want to, but this one stands alone just fine. Also, the earlier ones in the Vicky series struck me as very juvenile. I know, you're thinking, "Beth, you love children's books!" Ok, fine, yeah I do, but this book is very definitely young adult and that's what I expected and wanted from the others. (In one of them, the main conflict involves a tough NYC gang called the "Alphabats," who I assume escaped from Sesame Street?) So, if it were up to me, I would skip the first three in the series and just read this one. You can read the one after this one, though, called Troubling a Star, if you want to hear the end of Vicky's story. Also, they made a Disney channel movie of this book, and I've only seen a tiny bit of it myself, but I read about it on wikipedia and it seems like they changed the plot entirely. I guess death is too difficult a concept for children, or something. Yeah. That's why I had to suffer through The Lion King and Bambi when I was a kid. Stupid Disney.
Recommended for readers who like: Dolphins; Madeleine L'Engle; Twilight; My Sister's Keeper; The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants; A Time Apart
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