The Books: The Young Unicorns (Madeleine L’Engle)

Daily Book Excerpt: YA/Children’s books

3803-1.jpgNext book on the shelf is The Young Unicorns: The Austin Family Chronicles, Book 3 by Madeleine L’Engle.

It’s been a while since I read this book (which I love) – I think this is the beginning of Madeleine’s mystery/suspense books – usually having to do with the Austin family. The Murry family time-travel and help build Noah’s Ark and tesseract … the Austin family gets mixed up in international intrigues. So here’s what happens:

The Austin family is now living in New York City – where Dr. Austin has been hired to come on board with some research project. So suddenly, the country kids are in the city. L’Engle wrote this book in 1968 – when Manhattan waa much more visibly dangerous than it is now in its Disneyfied incarnation. She’s writing about the New York we see in Midnight Cowboy – when the subways were almost like a Mad Max situation, grafitti everywhere, and a sense of lawlessness and anything-goes. I remember that New York. So there’s a sense of real danger on the outskirts of the little family unit.

Now as I recall it – There are a couple of new people in the Austin family’s lives now. There is Emily – a young girl, a teenager – who had been blinded in some mysterious accident – (she was attacked?? Nobody knows why or who it was – although through the course of the book it all becomes clear). Emily is a piano prodigy. She stays with the Austin family – the apartment they are renting used to be where Emily lived – and it is thought by her doctors that to stay in a familiar place might help Emily. Oh – and I believe that there is no medical reason for her blindness. It is a mystery … Emily’s best friend is a great character, a teenager named Josiah Davidson, although everyone thankfully calls him Dave. Dave used to be in a gang. He was a bad kid. He has since turned his life around – mainly because of his devotion to Emily. He helps her to and from her music lessons. He reads out loud to her. Meanwhile, the opening scene of the book shows him hurrying through the darkened streets – with old gang members taunting him from the shadows. He is trying to stay clean.

Uhm – it gets really involved. There’s something called a Micro-Ray – there are two physicists who are working on some huge project (I’m thinking of Austin Powers right now) – if this Micro-Ray got in the wrong hands it would mean … apocalypse – or something like that.

Also – the book opens on a creepy haunted autumn night. The Austins sit around the dinner table. Emily and Dave are both there. And it comes out that all the kids, walking home from school that day, had passed a weird little antique shop called Phooka’s Antiques. They see a genie’s lamp sitting on a crate outside – and as a joke, they pick it up and try to call up a genie. Darkness is falling. And suddenly from behind them they hear a voice – they turn – and there is standing a huge scary-looking genie. He asks them if they have any wishes. Emily blurts out, “Please make me see again.” Suzy Austin gets angry at that wish and knocks the lamp out of Emily’s hand. Then, from behind them, comes an English-accented voice, “I think you are beyond that kind of wishing.” They all turn, and there stands a man holding a big black umbrella. He has no eyebrows. They have no idea who he is. He says to them, “I would be suspicious of a twentieth-century genie, children.” and then walks away. The genie, meanwhile, has vanished into the night. Leaving the children baffled and a little afraid. They end up telling Mr. and Mrs. Austin about this. The Austins believe them. It turns out, later – that the genie is actually not a real genie – but somehow part of the dark evil forces who want to co-opt this Micro-Ray thingie – shit, I am totally not remembering how it all comes out … but there are many different angles into this, and it’s very dangerous – the Austin kids, along with Emily and Dave – decide to solve this mystery – which ends up bringing them into contact with some very dangeorus people – people who know the secret behind Emily’s attack – and I think who know that Dr. Austin is working on this Micro-Ray project – and want to steal it from him. To use it for their own nefarious purposes. If anyone remembers more details about all of this, let me know.

My memories of the book have to do with the beauty of the characters. Emily is not an easy girl. She is pissed at being blind … she now has to re-learn how to play the piano – Music is her only solace, but not only that; it is her WORK. Madeleine L’Engle understands that: people who have WORK to do. Even if they are only a child. There is such a thing as genius and Emily has it. But she’s temperamental, and not adjusting to blindness with grace. Dave is a WONDERFUL character – you just love him. It is not easy for him to turn his back on a life of crime … but the kindness of the Austin family, their belief in him, as well as Emily’s need of him – helps him.

Throughout all of this intrigue – we get the typical L’Engle touches of … life lessons being learned. Redemption being possible.

Oh – and this is also her first book where the Cathedral of St. John the Divine – up near Columbia – is almost another character. L’Engle was very involved in that cathedral – she probably still is. She went to church there with her family, she also worked part-time in their library. It is a second home to her. The Cathedral shows up in many of her books as a kind of vortex. A place where the truth eventually will come out.

I love this book – I should read it again.

The excerpt I chose is from the beginning. It’s after the kids confess about their encounter with the genie. Dr. Austin says he will go by the antiques shop the next day to ask some questions … Vicky Austin, actually, was NOT with the others when the genie appears. She is bummed about it. She also is worried about her father – who seems different, troubled, secretive. One of L’Engle’s running themes is that moment all children have: when they realize their parents are HUMAN. Fallible. It can be a very upsetting thing … Vicky has noticed her father’s preoccupation and is obsessing over what it means. She and Emily have a conversation about it all before going to bed.


Excerpt from The Young Unicorns: The Austin Family Chronicles, Book 3 by Madeleine L’Engle.

In the bath Emily was singing. Vicky had learned that Emily did two kinds of singing: when she was happy she invented her own melodies; when she was angry or upset she picked more formal themes from the composers she was studying. Bach always indicated deep and serious thinking, coming to terms with some kind of problem. Chopin or Schumann were indications of self-pity, but were seldom heard. A purely intellectual problem, like trouble with her studies at school or memorizing from the unwieldy Braille manuscripts, was apt to be approached with Beethoven or, by contrast, Scarlatti.

Tonight the music that came from the tub was Bach, not a theme from one of the fugues, but one of the more introspective chorale preludes.

— What would I be singing, Vicky wondered, — if I sang out my moods?

If Emily had been one of her friends in the country, Vicky would have blurted out, “I’m scared. Something’s wrong with my father. Always, always he’s wanted to work in a big hospital where he could concentrate on his research, and now that he’s got exactly what he’s always wanted something’s wrong. It isn’t just tonight, but the way he snaps at Mother for no reason. And I went into his study once and he was just sitting there with his head in his hands.”

But she couldn’t wail in front of Emily. If she thought for a moment about all the problems Emily had to face, then a complaint even about somehting as fundamental as a change in her father, who had always seemed perfect, wasn’t possible.

Emily came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a large white towel, her long fine hair dark against it. “Vicky –”

“Yes. I’m here.”

Emily moved towards the voice and sat by the other girl on the window seat. Vicky turned from the river, from watching the lights across in New Jersey, a barge crawling up the river, cars streaming north and south on the West Side Highway, the lights of the park baring the dark branches of the trees, and looked at Emily. — I wonder, she thought, — if Emily used to sit here this way, looking out and dreaming …

“Vicky,” Emily said, “I love your mother, you know.”

“I know.”

“I don’t even remember my own mother, not really. I was only four when she died. Sometimes I think I remember things, but I’m never sure whether or not it’s something Papa’s told me. All I’ve really known have been housekeepers, and some of the teachers at school. Oh, Vicky –” Emily spread out her arms and Vicky dodged to avoid being hit on the nose, “when Mrs. McTavish went back to Scotland to live, and you all came to stay in Dr. Shasti’s and Dr. Shen-shu’s apartment, I thought I’d absolutely hate it when Papa arranged with your mother to have me eat with you and everything. I thought I was going to lose my freedom. I even talked to Dave about running away with him. But it’s been — splendiferous.”

“It’s been pretty splendiferous for us, too,” Vicky said. “Not financially, but getting to know you and Dave, and being friends.”

Emily gave a small sigh. “Mr. Theo think my guardian angel arranged it. He says it’s about time it started paying attention to me. Vic, I know Suzy was right, to knock the genie’s beastly old lamp out of my hands yesterday, but it’s you I want to talk to about it.”

Vicky said nothing, simply sat there on the window seat, waiting. The small boat moved on up the river under the delicate pale green lights of the George Washington Bridge, and slid out of sight. The wind moved the trees on the Drive back and forth across the street lamps so that light and shadow mingled and intermingled. She wanted to touch Emily for comfort, as she would have Rob, but she kept her hands in the lap of her bathrobe and looked steadily out over the river. The arch of the great bridge seemed to sway lightly in the wind. She shivered.

As though she had seen, Emily said, “It’s cold tonight.” She put her arms out and spread the palm of her hand against the window glass. “Well … when I could see, and I was practicing the piano, and I’d forget something – and the funny thing is that the pieces you forget are the ones you’ve memorized the longest – well, what would happen would be that if I tried to think what the notes were, I couldn’t, or if I tried to think with my mind which was the fingering Mr. Theo had worked out, I couldn’t. My mind just wouldn’t remember. You’ve had piano lessons. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes,” Vicky said. “And just the way you say, always with the pieces I’d known by heart best. I’d get my fingers mixed up and get stuck.”

“So what did you do then? Look it up in the music?”

“Not always,” Vicky said slowly.

“Well, what did you do?”

Vicky said reluctantly. “I closed my eyes and thought about something else. If I sort of went into a daydream, or made plans about something or thought about homework – then, usually, I’d remember the notes.”

Emily’s strong fingers closed about the cushion of the window seat. “But it wasn’t your mind that remembered, was it? Your fingers would remember for you?”

“Yes. It always struck me as sort of funny, how my fingers could do it when my eyes or my mind couldn’t. But I’m not a musician, Emily. I love music, all our family does, but Mother’s the only one who really might have been good at it if she hadn’t married Daddy. I love to fiddle around at the piano, but I used to goof off on my practicing.”

Emily frowned, turning the subject back. “I hated to have to look something up in the music after I’d memorized it. I used to make my fingers remember for me, when my mind had forgotten, and they almost always would. I think it’s called kinesthetic memory or something. Anyhow, I always had it, you see. And that made things easier, I suppose. I mean about what was most important. Even so, I’ve never quite believed it. Being blind. I know it with my mind. I mean, I do understand that there isn’t going to be a grand and splendid operation the way there is in TV or the movies. But I don’t know it with me. I don’t suppose I ever will, no matter how used I get to it. I still dream seeing. I dream seeing all of you. I wonder if you really look the way I dream you? I know your mother has purply-blue eyes Suzy’s, but I see them as grey. And your father’s a brown person. So’re you, but not as dark a brown.”

“Mouse,” Vicky muttered rather bitterly.

“And I can see your apartment. Your mother described all the colors and furniture to me one day, and I can see it. I used to be afraid to go back up, but now the apartment is you, all of you, the Austins … Well. I forgot to brush my teeth. Be right back.” She hitched the towel around her like a Roman toga and left the window seat. From the bathroom she called over the sound of the water, “You know the Englishman –”

“What Englishman?” Vicky asked vaguely. This was the first time Emily had ever talked about her blindness, or had referred, even directly, to the accident that had caused it.

But Emily had moved far beyond her last thought. She sounded impatient. “Oh, you know, Vicky, the one who spoke to me after I called the genie up. The one Rob said had no eyebrows. Do you suppose we’ll ever see him again?”

“I doubt it.”

“I don’t,” Emily said.

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5 Responses to The Books: The Young Unicorns (Madeleine L’Engle)

  1. Harriet says:

    If I remember correctly, the Micro-Ray was an early laser. So it could be used to cut things destructively, or to do delicate surgery on eyes like Emily’s. At the time she wrote it, of course, she had no idea that kids would have laser pointers to play with. Which makes it dated, but prescient. It’s a great book–I have read it nearly as much as the others, but it’s sitting on a shelf right next to my computer, so I should pull it out.

  2. John says:

    Here’s an article by someone who aslo remembers that NY – and warns that is is never far beneath the surface.

  3. red says:

    That is a GREAT piece, John. So so true.

  4. John says:

    That dude can write. Here’s another one that had me choked up. You can guess why.

  5. red says:

    Harriet – aha – yes, of course. The laser project could save Emily’s eyes – so there’s a whole technology aspect here: Lasers – to be used for good or evil? I forgot that.

    And isn’t the genie dude somehow – recruiting all the gang members to, like, steal the Micro Ray and take over New York City? I seem to remember a climactic moment in an abandoned subway station. Did I dream that?

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