MG/YA Book Reviews by a MG/YA Writer
Welcome to the August edition of Bookcase Bizarro!
Although this post was scheduled for July 31, my website is currently experiencing some technical difficulties. I’m on it, but it may mean that my website redesign ends up happening sooner rather than later… like, now. But that’s okay. It’s the summer, things are chill, I can roll with it. Of course, I can.
There isn’t much author news to report this month. I took all of June off to do my taxes and to re-establish my backyard food garden, which was put on hold while I started up my publishing company (Crooked Mile Media). It sure feels good to get my hands in the dirt again! I’ve decided to stay away from spring book releases in the future in order to protect my food-growing time.
Aside from growing sprouts and microgreens indoors and greens and herbs outdoors at my home, a friend has offered me some garden space up at her farm. I’m beyond excited to be adding another garden to my roster. This year, I’m trialing some summer lettuces and chard, and I’ve prepped a bed for autumn garlic. I’ve already poured over several seed catalogues to select a good bush variety of winter squash, tomatoes, peppers, and pollinator-friendly edible flowers for next year, as well as garlic varieties for this year. And because I’m somewhat obsessive about the things that I love, I’ve already created a garden plan, which includes establishing a new, 3X18 foot garden plot using the no-till method this summer. I tried this method out in the city with great success and am hoping to replicate it out in the country.
I promised I would talk about my book review strategy in the June newsletter (which I missed because of garden work), but that will have to wait. This month, I offer you an essay I felt compelled to write after recent revelations came to light about Canadian writer Alice Munro, who chose to stay with her pedophilic husband even after learning that he’d sexually abused her youngest daughter. CBC’s The Front Burner has an excellent podcast episode that’s really worth listening to.
My essay is not about Alice Munro. It’s about Madeleine L’Engle, the children’s author who wrote A Wrinkle in Time and was just as enmeshed in her own web of fabricated deceptions. I wrote it to sort out my feelings after learning unpleasant truths about a favourite author, and to explore my power and responsibility as a reader. I hope you enjoy it.
Wrinkled: The Entwined Legacies of Madeleine L’Engle and Meg Murry
Confession: As a kid, I always secretly hated Charles Wallace.
That’s Charles Wallace Murry, the odiously precocious little brother of Meg Murry in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, a combination Christ-child/golden boy, hailed as a ‘new being’ by his parents. I hated him in exactly the same proportion as I loved Meg, his gloriously imperfect—and sometimes unlikeable—older sister. Meg as a chaotic, nerdy tween was so believable and relatable. There was nothing believable or relatable about Charles Wallace, who asked for Genesis as a bedtime story and behaved more like an adult than a 4-year-old kid. As if that wasn’t bad enough, L’Engle liberally sprinkled the words ‘special’ and ‘important’ throughout the book to describe him. Nobody, said his mother, is quite up to Charles.
Ugh. How did Meg stand it? My own little brother was enough of a pain, and he was nowhere near as annoying as Charles. Yet Meg never got jealous of Charles Wallace. She never called him out on his arrogance, or had a fight with him. Instead, she clung to him with an almost slavish devotion that seemed to contradict her volatile and impatient temperament. I didn’t buy it. No kid as angry and as uncontrolled as Meg would be able to maintain equilibrium with such a smug and pompous little jerk. It struck a false note.
***
It was 2004 when a bomb in the form of a New Yorker article written by Cynthia Zarin threatened to detonate the literary legacy of Madeleine L’Engle. In it, L’Engle’s children and grandchildren revealed to the world that the life she’d depicted in her non-fictional memoirs bore little resemblance to the one they’d actually lived, and that she’d routinely appropriated events from their own lives to use in her fiction, despite their protests. As an emotionally deprived child raised by self-absorbed parents, Madeleine the adult often behaved in emotionally deprived, self-absorbed ways. Madeleine L’Engle went from being a revered author to a monster.
Of course, the L’Engle’s children and grandchildren were not making her into a monster by telling the truth about their own lives. They were taking ownership of something that had been denied to them by L’Engle’s lieterary legacy. I somehow missed Zarin’s article when it came out and only came across it in 2023. I admit it left me reeling. I struggled to reconcile my love for her book, A Wrinkle in Time, with the seriously dysfunctional behaviour the article had revealed. My thoughts kept drifting back to Meg. As a kid, I’d been bothered by how she was depicted in the later books of the Time Quartet. I wanted to see what I would make of Meg now, in light of the new (to me) revelations about its author.
In many ways, I was Meg. Awkward, shy, far behind my peer group socially and out of step in my interests and passions, unsure of myself and genuinely terrified most of the time. Like Meg, I was also experiencing difficulties in school. Some were the problems common to every bookish, shy, socially awkward kid, but others were related to existential struggles with certain subjects, like math. I absolutely hated it. Meg’s anger at the school system was also my anger. How well I understood it!
What I didn’t understand was the Murry family.
Meg’s home life bore absolutely no resemblance to my family or the families of all my friends, even those whose parents were university professors. Where were the tired parents, the arguments and misunderstandings? Despite not knowing what had happened to her husband (who’d been absent without explanation for over four years) Mrs. Murry always maintained an air of Uber Mom invincibility. She always had the right answers for her children at the right times. She breezed about her kitchen and lab with a quick and practised efficiency, making stew over a Bunsen burner and French toast for breakfast. There was never a morning when she couldn’t get out of bed because of depression. She never lost it. Not once. Even as a kid, I realized that Mrs. Murry was too good to be true. She was a fake.
As an adult re-reading the story of Meg, I felt as if I was being force-fed a vision of what a family should be. The unreality of that picture was every bit as creepy to me as the compulsory conformity that exists on Camazotz, the evil planet Meg, Calvin and Charles fight to free themselves from. The Murrys’ self-conscious, almost preening intellectualism slammed into me with the force of a gale. Mr. and Mrs. Murry are not just quirky and creative; they are a power couple. Mr. Murry works on classified files at Cape Canaveral, and is a close confidante of the President of the United States. Mrs. Murry is a scientist with not one, but two PhDs to her name. Two of their four children are exceptional. Mr. Murry gives special IQ tests to Meg and Charles Wallace that he later presents as evidence to assure Meg that she is not ‘dumb.’ Twin brothers, Sandy and Dennys, who love sports and are popular, average students, aren’t given the same tests as Charles and Meg and appear so little in the story it almost amounts to a dismissal.
As a kid, I certainly thought of sports-loving, popular, average students like Sandy and Dennys as ‘dumb,’ retaliatory payback for the misery I suffered at their hands. But intellectual arrogance is exactly what leads Charles Wallace—and his father before him—straight into the clutches of IT, a giant, evil brain intent on taking over the universe. That L’Engle chose a disembodied brain as the embodiment of evil shows that she herself was aware of the limitations of intellectual ability. So why did she feel it necessary to idealize this hyper-intellectual family?
The first clue comes from L’Engle herself, in the 2004 interview with Cynthia Zarin:
“I think that my characters came to me because I didn’t have any family, and I wanted to have a family, and it was the only way I could get it,” said L’Engle, in response to a question by Zarin.
ZARIN: “But you had your own family.”
L’ENGLE: “Even so, writing the stories came from my childhood experiences.” i
Those childhood experiences were indeed bleak. L’Engle’s parents were devoted to each other to such a degree that there was little room in their lives for their daughter. One day (without 12-year-old L’Engle’s knowledge), they drove their car through the gates of a Swiss boarding school, introduced L’Engle to the headmistress, and left her there. ii
Madeleine struggled to fit in, and was treated as stupid by one of her teachers. iii I too, knew the feeling of not quite making the grade. As an adult, it never entirely went away. I wonder if it ever did for L’Engle? In her books, in social gatherings and at home with her kids, she was prone to breaking out quotes, perhaps a kind of footnoting to prove the validity of her opinions.
When a traumatized L’Engle didn’t do well at school, her father apparently kept her there to punish her mother, because it had been her idea to send L’Engle there in the first place. (L’Engle’s granddaughters, Charlotte Jones Voiklis and Lena Roy dispute this part of the story in their biography, Becoming Madeleine, where they say it had been her father’s idea to send her to the school.) iv
Is it any wonder that a kid so unloved by her parents might have grown into a woman who wanted—needed—to manufacture an idyllic family for herself in whatever way she could? But I wonder who needed this idealized vision of a family more, Meg or L’Engle herself?
To answer that, we have to consider what happened to post-Wrinkle Meg. It’s glaring that the strongest and most memorable memorable of the Murry family (and instantly relatable to angry girls everywhere), was the only one who didn’t have a professional career. (Even ‘average’ Sandy and Dennys ended up being a doctor and a lawyer respectively.) Mathematically brilliant, brave Meg became a wife and mother, bearing six children and supporting her scientist husband, Calvin, who goes on to make groundbreaking scientific discoveries. As a child, I felt utterly betrayed on Meg’s behalf. Why couldn’t she marry Calvin, be a mother and make breakthrough discoveries of her own? Did one choice necessarily cancel out the other?
L’Engle was apparently quite upset with the criticism levelled at her for making Meg of a full-time mother and homemaker. Defending her decision, she said that women must be free to choose making a home and nurturing a family as a vocation. v She’s not wrong. The only trouble is that she hasn’t convinced me that Meg would have made that choice. I can’t believe that Meg, a rebellious, brilliant mathematician and physicist, would choose home and hearth as her vocation for nearly her entire adult working life, giving up up her PhD to raise six kids. (Why not stop after two or three?) If L’Engle could imagine this for Meg, she didn’t detail how Meg got there and there is evidence that Meg wasn’t entirely happy with her vocation. In A House Like a Lotus, we get a hint of a regretful Meg struggling with her decisions and what they might have cost her.
L’Engle did not give up her career in order to raise a family. Unlike Mrs. Murry, she was not a study in equilibrium as she struggled to balance motherhood and a non-traditional career in the small town of Goshen, Connecticut. From 1951 to 1959, life was difficult. L’Engle didn’t fit in with the other village women, most of whom were stay-at-home wives and mothers. Finding enough uninterrupted time to write was hard to manage with young children underfoot. She missed New York with an intense ferocity. Finances were tight. Two of her novels were rejected. In When she finally sold a book in 1957, her writing life was cut short when two of their Connecticut friends died and their orphaned daughter, Maria, came to live with L’Engle’s family. vi Why not include parts of that struggle in Meg’s story? For a woman who wrote to make sense of her life, the omission seems strange. vii
“I can’t put disturbing things about people into print,” L’Engle said of her non-fiction. Of her fiction, she claimed that she did not write from life. viii
But she did.
L’Engle’s own children called her non-fictional memoirs the most fictional of all of her works, while the novels were closer to the truth. Both included private—and sometimes traumatic—incidents from their own lives, re-written in ways to suit L’Engle’s own needs.
“She would make up a narrative to confirm what she thought should have been,” said L’Engle’s eldest child, Josephine Jones. “She would make sense of a thing to her own satisfaction. Then for her that story was reality.” ix
When her children protested against this invasion of privacy or tried to put forth their own versions of events, especially if they contradicted what L’Engle had written, L’Engle insisted her version was the right one. The writer who created Meg, a child who resisted an evil takeover by wielding the power of the love, is also the mother who could not see how damaging an act it was to deny her children the right to name their own experiences. This might even be considered a profound act of erasure, an X-ing, as it were.
The children were left with an unreconcilable schism between the truth as they knew it and their mother’s continuous acts of appropriation and revision. “How do you make yourself real to your own mother?” Charlotte Jones Voiklis, L’Engle’s granddaughter, wondered. x
What L’Engle couldn’t bear to write about were the difficult bits of her own life. Her own troubles were excised or eliminated to fit her idealized visions and the public personae she increasingly adopted as her fame grew.
Given that L’Engle was a writer who purposely blurred the relationship between fact and fiction in both her work and her life, it’s fair to ask if her revisionist tendencies made their way into the lives of her characters. They certainly did with Vicky Austin, the main character of L’Engle’s Austin family series. Charlotte Jones Voiklis, one of L’Engle’s granddaughters, said that L’Engle never showed us who Vicky had become because it would have meant looking at her own life in a way that she was unable or unwilling to do. xi I think the same thing happened with Meg. By remaking Meg into a kind of earth mother, L’Engle excised all of Meg’s faults, the very things that made her so relatable and would have made her fight back or at least struggle with the demands of her choices, struggles that L’Engle as a writer and mother had faced. Were L’Engle’s own conflicts between writing and motherhood simply excised from Meg’s life because it was part of an inconvenient truth that didn’t fit into the idealized visions of family that L’Engle needed to believe in?
A strict separation between life and work might not hold when an author purposely blurs the lines between fiction and reality as L’Engle did, presenting an idealized and sanitized picture as the true one. It’s worth noting that L’Engle’s children and grandchildren have never asked for L’Engle to be cancelled, only for fans, readers and the literary establishment to stop worshipping at the altar of a manufactured legacy. They have asked for a revision of that legacy, moving from hagiography towards a more fulsome and complex reckoning in order to better understand both Madeleine L’Engle and her work.
Such an understanding requires me as a reader to hold on to conflicting and often contradictory truths, allowing them to co-exist inside my mind. I can find the Murry family utterly unconvincing, yet remain utterly enchanted by A Wrinkle in Time. I can love Meg, yet criticize the unconvincing (to me) legacy L’Engle saddled her with. I can understand how an unloved child grew into a woman who needed to control the narrative in both her life and work, to the extent that her children and her characters were effectively silenced. I can use this understanding to allow for a level of complexity that the manufactured self L’Engle presented to the world only denied. It would be easier to retreat into the role of a betrayed or defensive acolyte, but that feels too much like a giving away of power—an abdication of the responsibility I have to question received wisdom and think for myself. I have agency as a reader. Why not use it to stop putting writers on pedestals when they are so very clearly human?
Endnotes:
iZarin, Cynthia. “The Storyteller.” The New Yorker (Vol. 80, Issue 8), April 12, 2004, p.6.
iiIbid, p.3.
iiiVoiklis, Charlotte Jones and Lena Roy, Becoming Madeleine: A Biography of the Author of A Wrinkle in Time by Her Granddaughters, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2018, p.32
ivIbid, p.29.
vhttps://www.mebondbooks.com/2016/05/18/madeleine-lengle-living-creatively/
viVoiklis and Roy, Becoming Madeleine, pp.120-134.
viiMarcus, Leonard S. Listening for Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L’Engle in Many Voices, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2012, p.171
viiiZarin, Cynthia. “The Storyteller,” p.6.
ixMarcus, Leonard S. Listening for Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L’Engle in Many Voices, p.171
xIbid, p.204
xiZarin, Cynthia. “The Storyteller,” p.6.
SHADOW APPRENTICE IS NOW ON SALE!
Thirteen-year-old Ermin is a gifted mechanic and the worst student at St. Anselm’s Training School for Orphans. She’s just failed her exams for the third time—something nobody’s ever done. Worse, Ermin’s been running her own repair business for money—something that’s expressly forbidden. If the headmistress finds out, Ermin will go to prison. Her future will be over before it’s even begun.
But that’s not her only secret.
Her best friends, Colin and Georgie, are wizards in a world where magic is strictly controlled. Ermin worries that her friends will be captured, drained of their power, then banished. When Georgie’s caught aiding the Wizard’s Resistance, Ermin repairs a broken flying carpet so all three of them can escape.
Hesitant to join the Resistance because of her lack of magical power, Ermin steals an experimental device from a wizard hunter that could destroy every wizard in the Creek. She’s faced with a choice: either smash the device or convert it into a different kind of weapon—one that not only helps wizards but just might get her an apprenticeship at the prestigious Guild Academy.
Ermin’s got one chance to get it right. If she fails, she risks losing her two best friends… and her dreams.
Thanks for being a Bookcase Bizarro reader! Join us in August for more author news, and more MG/YA book reviews. See you then!
#IMWAYR is a weekly blog hop hosted by Unleashing Readers and Teach Mentor Texts. Its focus is to share the love of KIDLIT and recommend KIDLIT books to readers of all ages.
Greg Pattridge also hosts weekly MG blog hop MMGM every Monday at his website, Always in the Middle.
