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Madeleine L'Engle has died at age 88.

Her writing was one of the biggest influences on my thinking on religion and death. I wish her well in whatever comes next.

There are little butterflies fluttering all around as I sit here in the grass. Allelujah.

More on Madeleine L'Engle

Now that I have a bit more time...

I read the Time Quartet as a kid, just like pretty much everyone else my generation. I enjoyed them. I think I may have liked them enough to do a book report on one, but they weren't life changing.

In middle school, I developed a brief affection for unicorns. One of the books that popped up on the library's computer was L'Engle's The Young Unicorns. I read it, enjoyed it, and went looking for more of her books. One of them, with a cover featuring a girl riding a jumping dolphin, jumped out at me.

That was A Ring Of Endless Light. I loved it. The main character Vicky was me. The Austin family was my family, down to the big old family camping trip and feeling awkward for saying grace at dinner. I read it over and over again. Shortly thereafter, my grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and it became even more of a comfort (in the book, Vicky's grandfather is dying of leukemia, and much of the book focuses on how she copes with his impending death).

I think I must have read it 50 times in 8th grade, and became quite infatuated with dolphins in the process. It also lead me to the rest of her work, which I devoured - the young adult portions, anyways (I suppose I should try some of the adult books again now that I may be able to relate a touch better). I didn't read it quite so frequently in high school, but still a few times a year up through early adulthood.

When my aunt was dying of cancer, it helped me again, along with her similarly themed Crosswicks Papers book The Summer of the Great-Grandmother.

I haven't read it in a few years (I don't find myself re-reading books often these days - there's too many I want to read that I'm not getting to). I lent my falling-apart copy to one of my housemate's friends, as she struck me as the type who might relate to it, and haven't seen it since, which is ok, as it was falling apart and had really horrible cover art. She hasn't ever mentioned whether she read it or enjoyed it.

mactavish posted a link to a blog entry with a less than positive view of her personal family life. She said "I just now read this thing, perhaps what things were really like, and I'm glad. People are still human." And yeah, that's basically my feeling. In the Ender series, Orson Scott Card (another author you might call influential on my teen/early adult life) presented the idea of a speaker for the dead, who told the story of a person's life, both bad and good. And that's how that feels. Speaking for the dead, not speaking ill of the dead.

In the comments, someone quoted another article, including this bit:

"When I mentioned to Charlotte Jones that Vicky is stuck in time, and asked why L'Engle never shows us who Vicky became, she said simply, "Gran can't. I've asked her about it. Vicky is the character who's closest to her, to who she was as a child, and it would mean looking at her own life in a way she's not prepared to do. Or not willing to do."

There are few literary characters who stick with me as strongly as Vicky, leaving me wondering what became of her (Jess Aarons, from Bridge To Terabithia, is the other). I didn't quite hope for another book, as the last Austin Family book, Troubling A Star was, while enjoyable, somewhat anticlimactic after Ring - an environmental mystery (similar in flavor to Many Waters or possibly Arm Of The Starfish), rather than a ponderance on the nature of life, love, death, and dolphins. But I did want to find out what happened.

And, while it doesn't clarify the question of whether or not she ends up with Adam, that's answer enough for me.