Madeleine L’Engle and Judy Blume: my two favorite authors from my tween, teens to through my adulthood even! Mostly though, my tween and teen years. Their books were my friends, my rope to hang on to, my saving grace, safe place to be, in the pages of their books.
Madeleine L’Engle’s Camilla was my absolute favorite of her books. I read it over and over and over! It taught me a lot about how I viewed people, and was a very sweet story of first love. Following Camilla in ‘second favorite’ is A Wrinkle In Time, which is amazingly enough soon to become a movie!! A Wrinkle In Time is also sold in graphic novel form, and it is done just excellent! These books are seemingly timeless and still remain sought after and read and loved by this generation of kids.
Camilla
Fifteen-year-old Camilla Dickinson has led a sheltered life on the Upper East Side with her architect father and stunningly beautiful mother. But this winter the security she has always known has vanished, because her parents’ marriage is coming apart – and Camilla is caught in the middle. She finds a way to escape her troubles when she meets Frank, her best friend’s brother, who is someone she can really talk to about life, death, God, and her dream of becoming an astronomer. When Frank introduces her to the important people in his life, who are so different from anyone she has met before, he opens her eyes to worlds beyond her own, almost as if he were a telescope helping her to see the stars.This novel, one of the author’s earliest, is the story of a girl who, with the help of her first love, leaves childhood behind and enters adulthood with a newfound sense of self and inner strength.
A Wrinkle In Time
It was a dark and stormy night; Meg Murry, her small brother Charles Wallace, and her mother had come down to the kitchen for a midnight snack when they were upset by the arrival of a most disturbing stranger.
“Wild nights are my glory,” the unearthly stranger told them. “I just got caught in a downdraft and blown off course. Let me sit down for a moment, and then I’ll be on my way. Speaking of ways, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.”
A tesseract (in case the reader doesn’t know) is a wrinkle in time. To tell more would rob the reader of the enjoyment of the book. A Wrinkle in Time, winner of the Newbery Medal in 1963, is the story of the adventures in space and time of Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin O’Keefe (athlete, student, and one of the most popular boys in high school). They are in search of Meg’s father, a scientist who disappeared while engaged in secret work for the government on the tesseract problem.
The following review sums up the book perfectly:
“A book that every young person should read, a book that provides a road map for seeking knowledge and compassion even at the worst of times, a book to make the world a better place.” ―Cory Doctorow
Pick up any one of Madeleine’s books, you will not be sorry.
Peace.
