The Books: Meet the Austins (Madeleine L’Engle)

Daily Book Excerpt: YA/Children’s books

Next book on the shelf is Meet the Austins: The Austin Family Chronicles, Book 1 by Madeleine L’Engle.

So we’re now done with the Time Quartet – although those characters still show up in her books – She has another series – I guess it’s called The Austin Family series. These are not science fiction – these people do not have supernatural experiences, just real-life ones. The Austin family is loosely based on Madeleine L’Engle’s own family (the one she had as an adult). There’s a father who’s a doctor, and four kids: John the oldest, Vicky, Suzy and Rob. In the first chapter, a tragedy happens – I think they get the call that an uncle died, a favorite uncle – this is Vicky’s first encounter with death (the book is a first-person book, told from Vicky’s point of view) – and they end up adopting Maggy, the uncle’s daughter. L’Engle and her husband also did this – there was an adopted child. Maggy is a handful. According to Vicky, she doesn’t seem to be grieving properly. Vicky has a lot to learn. Maggy is a brat, and her big fat brattiness is one of the ways she expresses her rage at being left an orphan. The family needs to adjust to Maggy – and that’s what this whole book is about. It’s a simple book – no unicorns or time travel – but L’Engle has a way of writing about family life that seems very real. For example, there is an entire chapter about the aftermath of little Suzy reading Charlotte’s Web. Suzy realizes, in a terribler a-ha moment – that the bacon she eats every morning could be Wilbur! So she refuses to eat bacon. But the whole thing becomes a family crisis – Suzy literally cannot recover from reading that book, it has rocked her little 9 year old world. It’s that kind of observational stuff that L’Engle does best – the DETAILS.

Anyway, it’s not a great book – but it is the introduction of the family who is the star in many more of her books (some of which are my favorites) – so of course I love it.

I’m going to post my favorite bit of writing in the book. I knew exactly what I wanted to choose. There is an ice storm. The farmhouse where they live loses power. Mr. Austin is stuck at the hospital. So the family hangs out at the house – and … it’s just how L’Engle describes the whole thing. If you’ve lived through an actual ice storm, you’ll know that she writes it down perfectly.

This book has an ease to it … it’s not about anything big, it’s not trying too hard to make a point, or have a lesson … It’s about a couple of months in the life of this one family. L’Engle commits to the details: what the kitchen is like, how Mrs. Austin plays the piano when she’s stressed out, how the family talks to each other over dinner, what they argue about, where people get STUCK in life – how sometimes you need to be smacked out of a bad mood (not literally – but there’s a nice “tough love” aspect to the Austin parents) … It’s just a nice simple book.

Excerpt from Meet the Austins: The Austin Family Chronicles, Book 1 by Madeleine L’Engle.

During the afternoon the wind shifted, swinging around from the southeast to the northwest, and the thermometer dropped down to a shivering ten degrees. Even when the furnace is working full time the house is coldest when the wind is blowing hard from the northwest. Mother stationed us in front of the fireplaces and we kept putting logs on and as long as we stayed right close we weren’t too cold. Mother began to worry about the pipes, and she and John went upstairs and draped blankets over the radiators to try to keep them from freezing. The office phone rang once, but when we went to answer it, it was completely dead.

Have you ever noticed how things look different when it’s terribly cold? I don’t think it’s imagination to say that things look harder – the grasses and small trees especially. And things don’t have as much color, they fade. Uncle Douglas says that this is observant of me, and absolutely true. And then there’s the feel, the cold against your face as though your skin had been turned to polished metal. And I always feel, for some reason, terribly clean when it’s specially cold. And all kinds of wood, trees, and the wood of the house, creak in protest.

About six o’clock Daddy walked in, and we all rushed at him and tried to climb up on him, until Mother shouted, “Children! Daddy’s tired! Leave him alone!” And she sent us all to sit in front of the fireplace in the kitchen while she got dinner at the fireplace in the living room, and John and I knew she was telling Daddy about who Sally really was and everything that had happened.

We all went to bed early because in an ice storm that’s the coziest, warmest thing to do.

I don’t know how long we’d been asleep when I felt someone shaking me, and I opened my eyes and it was Mother, holding a flashlight. “Put something warm on, Vicky,” she said, “and come downstairs and see fairyland.”

I put on my bathrobe and fuzzy slippers and wrapped a blanket around myself and ran downstairs, and so did everybody else. Daddy had Rob rolled up in a blanket and was carrying him, which pleased Rob very much. We looked outdoors and the moon was high and full and it streamed through the trees and every single tiny twig was cased in ice and shimmering like diamonds. And the ground shimmererd, too, because it was covered with spangles of ice. The two birches were twin shining arcs of ice that seemed to be spraying off rays of light. As the wind shook the trees tiny bits of ice would break off and catch the moonlight as they fell to the ground. Little clouds scudded across the moon, and it made the moon look as though it were flying across the sky; and then the trees made long delicate shadows that came and went along the icy ground. It was so beautiful we couldn’t speak, any of us. We just stood there and looked and looked. And suddenly I was so happy I felt as though my happiness were flying all about me, like sparkles of moonlight off the ice. And I wanted to hug everybody, and tell how much I loved everybody and how happy I was, but it seemed as though I were under a spell, as though I couldn’t move or speak, and I just stood there, with joys streaming out of me, until Mother and Daddy sent us up to bed.