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.
I must say, the first two hundred pages of this book are garbage. To summarize ALL that happens in these pages: Polly O'Keefe (product of Calvin O'Keefe and Meg Murry) has come to stay with her genius grandparents, Doctor Murry and Doctor Murry. She has tea, she swims, she discovers a time portal to the world of North American druids, she has tea, she swims, she meets with Zachary Gray (most obnoxious little shit ever), she talks about time portals with the bishop. She has tea. She swims. Over. And over. No action, just tea. I GET IT.Garbage. However, the plot improves dramatically after Zachary, seriously a bigger dumbass piece of shit than both Edmund AND Eustace of Narnian sojourns, pulls Polly through the time portal in a vain and horribly misguided attempt to fix his heart defect. Because, you know, there's nothing like the three-thousand-year-old druid technologies to fix a (literally) broken heart.Through the time portal, Polly and Zachary become better acquainted with the People of the Wind, a mythological mix of European druids and Native Americans: Tav, Karralys, Anaral, and Cub. Tav toys with the notion of sacrificing Polly to the gods in order to bring rain and end their drought, buuuuut he gets over it and sorta-kinda falls for her instead. It's the aptly named People Across the Lake who really want to sacrifice Polly. No, I mean they really obviously want to drain her of her blood in a stone basin during the full moon, but somehow one person does not recognize this. Who, you ask? Zachary fucking Gray.Disappointed in the druid healers among the People of the Wind (go figure), Zachary tries his luck among the People Across the Lake by enslaving Polly for them. If you had any reservations about letting Zachary die of heart failure, they just died alongside Polly's dreams. As frustrating and exciting as all this may be, it is resolved rather tidily in the end. Zachary is remorseful, Polly somehow forgives him, and the gang makes it back to the 20th Century. A thrilling 150 pages weighed down by 200 pages of garbage. 1 star + 5 stars = 3 stars in Goodreads math. (Oops, is this review riddled with spoilers? Sorry.)Buy this title from Powell's Books.
What do You think about An Acceptable Time (1990)?
It's been a long time since I revisited L'Engle. As a kid, I LOVED _A Wrinkle in Time_, and really enjoyed _A Wind in the Door_. The last books by L'Engle I read with enthusiasm were _Dragons in the Waters_ and _Irrational Season_, both in the late 70s and early 80s. But then I got tired of the aristocratic limits of the main characters: their accolades (multiple PhDs, Nobel Prizes . . .), their cultivated tastes, their high-minded dialogue, in a word, their "Mary-Sue-ness." What drew me to Meg in _Wrinkle_ was her flaws, her fear. But L'Engle's later books seem rather to belabor her protagonists' extraordinary brilliance, specialness, and all-round perfection. I don't need to "relate" to protagonists, necessarily, but what started to get to me was the particular kind of culture--Anglo-American, genteel, Episcopalian--being privileged over all others, regardless of its merits. And that cultural orientation colonizes the later fantasies to their detriment._An Acceptable Time_ follows the story of Polly O'Keefe, daughter of Meg and Calvin, staying with her grandparents in Connecticut for enhanced study (she's too advanced for her local high school). She discovers a breach in time allowing her to connect with peoples who lived in the area 3000 years before. She feels a strong affinity with a local girl and boy, and almost immediately is able to communicate with them (the girl has been taught some English by another modern, the Bishop Colubra, who also travels between the times). In keeping with developments in earlier books, L'Engle posits early contact between Welsh wanderers and Native groups so that some have blue eyes and light hair. The Welsh have introduced writing (Ogam). The "People of the Wind" are stereotypical Native Americans who are one with nature and gentle and peaceable; on the other side of the lake are the Natives who are aggressive and savage. White people are automatically considered special, divine because of the color of their hair and skin. Polly learns that her sort-of beau Zach thinks these folks can heal his bad heart, but Polly must serve as goddess/sacrifice in exchange. Suspense occurs. But not that much. Polly is dutiful and restrained to a fault, and only succumbs to temptation out of unconscious compulsions. Polly's response to Zach's arrangement is puzzling: she resists being sacrificed, but still thinks she needs to rescue him. The resolution gestures to blood-sacrifice modulated through Christianity, but stops short of actual death. L'Engle was a pioneer in using contemporary science as ways of thinking about spirituality--her insights and imaginative engagement with advanced physics, mathematics, and the like, were exciting and resonant. But this book seems lazy. L'Engle's given up on thematizing science (dialogues between Polly and her grandparents read like rote conversations in early 19th century schoolroom texts: What is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle? --Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is . . .), and don't really add to the action or theme the way they do in _Wrinkle_. The Native peoples perform hocus-pocus healing through "energy" that just happens to be superior to anything that modern-day medicine can accomplish. Polly discovers that she can do the same thing--no need for medical school, I guess! Worse, L'Engle has not done any research into actual life and practices of Native peoples of the area during the time the story is allegedly set. Anachronisms abound--they are depicted raising sheep and cattle and wheat, when all of these were imports from Europe after Conquest. And she falls into the White Savior trope with no apology. This just reads to me like the kind of fantasy that gives fantasy a bad reputation--little effort to realize the setting in a way that feels thoughtful, little effort to communicate the otherness as well as the continuity of humans in other times and places.I wanted to like this more. But I don't.
—Naomi
This book gets a big ol' meh. This book was certainly better than a wind in the door and a swiftly tilting planet. However, it wasn't great. I found the plot moved pretty slowly in some places, and while it did pick up in others I found that it focused in on some odd subjects points. I found Zachary particularly unlikeable...like more unlikeable than any unlikeable character should be. I didn't find the Bishop to be particularly engaging. However, unlike many of the reviews have said I found Polly to be exceedingly engaging and was one of the few things that kept this book in the 'meh' category as opposed to the 'ugh' category. She was smart and caring and moral without being preachy. We got the feeling that she didn't have good self-esteem, however we were not beaten over the head with the information like we were with Meg. I did quite enjoy that the series ended with this book. While there were characters and relationships that we missed out on, it was a nice feeling that we came full circle with the series covering three generations of Murrys. What I didn't like was how stuck in their ways and angry the Murry parents and Dr. Colubra got when faced with the idea of the time door. I did get the feeling that at least Mr. Murry took it seriously, but it seemed simply to anger and confuse both Dr. Colubra and Mrs. Murry. Based on their characters in the previous books this is fairly out of character. On one hand I can understand the anger, they are worried for their granddaughter, however, they were much more forgiving with their own children. In a swiftly tilting planet they allowed Charles Wallace to sit out all night in the middle of a storm, but when faced with Polly's situation, they would hardly let her out of the house.
—Rebecca
OK, this is the "Time" series (A Wrinkle in Time) Book 5, and the "O'Keefe Family" series Book 4... a little confusing! I'm reading the Time series and am immediately thrust into book 4 of another series... which explains why I feel I'm missing a lot of information on the characters. This book starts out directly with the second generation -- Meg's daughter, Polly. I'm disappointed that the author hasn't given us more of Meg's story, and what happened with her brother, Charles Wallace? I hope we get some more insights into their lives during the course of the "O'Keefe Family" series...Polly O'Keefe, one of Meg's seven children, goes to visit her grandparents (Alex and Kate Murry - Meg's parents), and stumbles into a teseract on their property. I like that this character is written as intelligent with a knack for languages (really helpful when you're traveling 3,000 years into the past!).And the read goes on...Finished this story, and I was a little frustrated with the character of Polly and her tolerance of Zachary and his extreme selfishness. Once again, it provided great insight to another time period of earth's history, and the story was interesting. I'm moving on now to the first of the "O'Keefe" series - "The Arm of the Starfish" and hope to read more about Meg's story.
—Jennie
