Daily Book Excerpt: YA/Children’s books
Next book on the shelf is Troubling a Star
This is the second to last novel L’Engle has written (so far)- since then, all of her books have been Christian theological books (all of which I own and posted excerpts from a gazillion years ago when I was on my “religion shelf”. I swear. I’m borderline autistic.) I mean – the woman is still alive, so I guess there’s still hope that she will write more fiction – but I’m doubting it. She’s 500 years old by now. She seems to want to concentrate on the glory of God, and the Bible – and who can blame her? She’s strolling into that ol’ white light soon – maybe her imagination is no longer going into the fiction landscape. Sniff. Her last novel was A Live Coal In The Sea
Troubling a Star is the next Austin family series – written 15 years after A Ring of Endless Ligh
She had written a million OTHER books in between – also beloved books to me – but they were mainly having to do with the O’Keefe family … so anyway, Troubling A Star came out of what felt like nowhere, and I was really excited about it.
The plot is, briefly: Vicky’s grandfather is now dead. The Austin family has moved back to Thornhill, their country home. Vicky, after her summer with Adam and the dolphins and all that, feels very weird – like she can’t adjust to normal life again, and just being a regular high school student. She has grown up, basically. There are school dances – she’s never invited … and yet she gets these amazing letters from Adam, the older guy (let’s say he’s 20 or so) who took an interest in her the summer of the dolphins. She’s not interested in high school life. So she is very excited when Adam comes back to town – and invites her to come have dinner with his great-aunt Serena who lives nearby or some such other literary coincidental device.
His Great-Aunt Serena is a fascinating old lady – who I believe was a marine biologist in her younger days (the details are lost in the fogs of time) – Her husband – also named Adam – was also a marine biologist and if I’m remembering correctly – he disappeared during one of his jaunts to Antarctica … Bah. Can’t remember. Anyway – Vicky goes over to meet her and Serena ends up becoming a kind of mentor to Vicky. Vicky who is such an adolescent BRAT. Serena senses this in her – and basically ends up offering Vicky a trip to Antarctica. There’s a boat going – with a bunch of scientists – Serena somehow wangles a way to get Vicky a spot on the boat, thinking it will be really good for her to see the world, stop brooding, stop writing bad poetry, and stop feeling so different and self-absorbed. Somehow, Dr. and Mrs. Austin end up letting Vicky go. She has a chaperone – a dude named Cook – who has a very interesting background, the details of which are lost in the fogs of time. He’s one of those great L’Engle characters – wise, patient, understanding – something every teenager needs.
Oh wait -now I remember – After it is decided that Vicky is going to join the expedition – she gets a couple of strange anonymous postcards – threatening – warning her NOT to go on this trip.
Why? Cannot remember.
So then there is Vicky – alone on this boat – with an international group of scientists. Oh yeah, and she’s also really excited because Adam, supposedly, is going to be at Antarctica at the Marine Biology station there – so she is soooo looking forward to seeing him. Looking forward to it TOO much perhaps??
But then everything takes a turn. The boat they are on stops in port in Vespugia (L’Engle fans: hmmmm, sound familiar??) – a small dictatorship in Central America – which is basically a police state. But they are there to see … uhm … the Mayan pyramids or some such Inca nonsense? Again: fogs of time. Vicky – who has lived a sheltered life – suddenly finds herself asking questions about politics, becoming aware of repression, how other people live, how awful this fascistic Vespugia is.
Vicky ends up becoming a pawn in an international intrigue having to do with somehow shipping radioactive material out of (or into??) Vespugia … and Vicky somehow becomes the linchpin of this whole thing, dangerous forces moving in on her, using her … she ends up being kidnapped and deposited on a lonely glacier, bobbing in the southern ocean.
Of course she is saved. And the plot is discovered. And all is well again – but in all honesty – I can’t remember why these powerful forces choose VICKY to be their pawn … it all makes sense in the book, though.
The parts that I remember in the book (naturally) have to do with Vicky’s internal journey. Her awe at the beauty of Antarctica. Her secret love for Adam, and how you can just sense that … her heart’s gonna get broke. Not that he’s a bad guy, but that the timing is not right.
Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of the book – when Vicky and Great-aunt Serena talk about her upcoming trip to Antarctica.
It’s funny – I find Vicky kind of annoying here – like: Stop holding onto your illusions! LIfe is ROUGH, sister, and the sooner you know that the better!
But … uhm … that’s not the point. If I were a teenager, I might relate to Vicky’s resistance here – and also: Vicky needs to come through things on her OWN, she needs to learn things on her OWN … and she’s lucky enough to have found people in her life who let her have her own journey.
Excerpt from Troubling a Star: The Austin Family Chronicles, Book 5
I went downstairs as I heard Daddy’s car drive up. He was coming directly from the office. I met him in the sitting room, and the photograph album was open and on the table, waiting. Stassy said she’d bring Aunt Serena right down, and for us to make ourselves at home. We bent over the album and looked at snapshots of penguins, the babies huddled together in what Aunt Serena had told me were called creches. They were balls of fluff, and very cute.
I turned to my father. “I’m actually going to see them!”
Aunt Serena, leaning slightly on Stassy, came in and joined us. “You will find that penguins are totally communal creatures. If one penguin heads for the sea, two or three others will follow. If they stray from each other, they become easy prey for their predators.”
“Who are their predators?” I asked.
“Skuas, which are large, brown, carnivorous birds. Raptors. And seals. But while penguins are communal, living in community, they have no intimacy. They are dutiful with their babies, but they do not love.”
“Why?” I looked at a snapshot of a line of penguins which seemed to be hurrying down to the water.
“Life is too treacherous. If you become intimate with spouse or child who may be eaten in the next hour, you are too vulnerable. You cannot afford affection.”
Something in her voice made me shiver. “Penguins,” I said. “But human beings can’t live that way.”
“Sometimes they have to,” Aunt Serena said. “When parents knew that they are going to lose their babies and young children to scarlet fever, diptheria, measles, they could not afford the kind of secure love that exists between parents and children today.”
My father said, “It’s only in the past few generations that parents have been able to count on raising their children to adulthood. Modern medicine has changed a lot of things.”
“But people still loved each other, I mean, they always have!” I cried.
“True,” Daddy said. “But we allow ourselves to love more easily now that we have a greater hope for a reasonable life expectancy.”
I looked at a fluffy grey ball cuddling up to a grown penguin. “But mothers nursed the babies! How could they help being intimate?” I’d watched Mother nursing Rob. I’d watched Daddy watching Mother nursing Rob.
“They couldn’t help it,” Aunt Serena agreed, “but you already know, Vicky, that the more people you love, the more vulnerable you are.”
Yes, that was true. If I hadn’t loved my grandfather in a most deep and wonderful way, I wouldn’t miss him so much. If I didn’t love Adam, I wouldn’t be hurt because he’d signed his second letter “All the best,” instead of “Love”.
I said, “Maybe our intimacies are more precious if we know they may be taken away.”
Daddy looked at me and smiled and nodded slightly.
Aunt Serena said, “You are wise, my child. I do not regret my intimacies, no matter how expensive, not with any of the people I have loved: my husband, Adam. I loved him with great utterness, and when he died my life was split in two as though by lightning. And then my son –” She caught her breath. “I have known people who have drawn back after one devastating hurt, but that is a kind of suicide, at least to my mind. I am very fond of you, my dear, and I think you are fond of me.”
“I am! I love you!”
“But you know quite well that I will die long before you do.”
I whispered, “I know it’s a — a statistic.”
“It’s what being mortal is all about. I believe that Antarctica will awe and delight you, but you will be glad that you are a human being.”
“I am glad.” Then I added, “But I don’t think I like statistics.”
Aunt Serena nodded. “Statistics help free us from the compassion that is part of intimacy. Statistics do not understand that until we accept our mortality we canot even glimpse the wonder of our immortality.”
Before I had time to digest that, Stassy came in to announce that Mother had arrived with Suzy and Rob. They had come in the back way, so they could chat with Cook, and would join us in a moment.
We could hear voices and laughter from the direction of the kitchen. Then Mother and Suzy and Rob came in, and Rob hugged Aunt Serena, and Suzy turned right to the photograph album and the pictures of the penguins.
“I’m green with envy,” she said to me. “Promise me you’ll keep a list of everything you see.”
“Sure. There isn’t that much wildlife, but I’ll do my best.”
“There are lots of different kinds of penguins,” she said. “What’s this?” And she pointed to a picture of a church outside which was a very large double arch.
“The jawbones of two whales,” Aunt Serena said. “It gives you an idea what enormous creatures they are, the largest in the world.”
We moved into the dining room. Stassy helped Aunt Serena into her chair. “Meanwhile, my dear Vicky” — Aunt Serena reached for a crystal glass and took a sip of water — “we need to double-check that you have all the right clothes for Antarctica.”
We’d checked and rechecked my wardrobe several times. “Two pairs of lined jeans. Long johns. Thick socks.”
Mother said, “And I think we’ll get Vicky a new pair of boots, because the treads on her old ones are one down.”
Stassy came back in with a cheese souffle, high and puffy and golden.
“Aunt Serena,” Suzy asked, “why did Adam – your Adam – want to go to Antarctica?”
Aunt Serena smiled. “He had an inquiring mind, like you.” Suzy smiled with pleasure. Aunt Serena continued, “He loved marine biology. And he’d traveled to the Falklands with Adam Cook to visit Seth, Cook’s brother. Seth had been to Antarctica several times and waxed lyrical about it, and the two Adams were always ready for adventure.”
“Two Adams?”
“Adam Eddington and Adam Cook.”
I could tell that Suzy had a lot more questions, but she let Aunt Serena talk about some work Adam II had done with icefish, fish which adapt to the low temperature of the water by becoming transparent. The conversation was mostly about marine life, which kept Suzy happy, and it was an okay evening, though I realized that I was used to having Aunt Serena to myself.
The stuff with Adam isn’t really even wrong timing, it’s that he is starting to figure out that there’s danger and, not knowing Vicki’s already involved, tries to keep her out of it. She gets drawn in in the first place because of a misunderstanding–Adam II was killed (they suspect) because of science and politics and tensions between countries, so when Vicki’s Spanish teacher, who is from Vespugia, hears her name in connection with Adam, Vespugia, and Antarctica, he alerts the authorities in his home country. The plot she ends up in isn’t really connected much to that, but it ends up being more about the exchange of drugs and technology between Texas, Vespugia, and Prince Otto’s country than the radioactivity that Vicki’s overactive imagination comes up with. It’s not as sublimely wonderful as Ring of Endless Light, but I encountered this one first, and it’s still a favorite. It bears rereading, especially if you’ve forgotten parts.
Prince Otto! Ah yes. I remember him.
I just stumbled onto your blog from this woman’s work. I absolutely love Madeleine L’Engle -from the moment my 4th grade teacher read A Wrinkle in Time to our class. I have read every fiction book (own them all but Ilsa, only because I can’t track down a copy) and I have some of her religious writings. I would love for her to get one last book out before she goes, but I think that is wishful thinking. I haven’t read this particular one in years, so maybe I’ll crack it open.