Customer Reviews

The Other Side of the Sun: A Novel (Wheaton Literary Series)

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I think L'Engle touches...even caresses...a special nerve in those of us who become her lifelong fans. She touched my imagination when I was just 10 years old as I read "A Wrinkle in Time." Her image of Camazotz has stayed solidly at the front of my mind ever since, and I have enjoyed dipping into her well throughout the years to meet more characters, to travel to new cultures, to have new adventures, and to silently cheer on many as they come of age.

That all said, and as many other reviewers have said, this book IS DIFFERENT!!! In this story, L'Engle makes some very heavy points through very beautiful but sometimes dark mediums. At first, the story seems ordinary enough as an English bride, Stella, moves in with her husband's family down in the south at the turn of the century. But even as you meet the cast, you have premonitions that this tale might not flow as nicely as some of her other works. There is a darkness to the people that takes away even from the amusing eccentricities of the family.

As the story builds - bringing in the frightening power of the KKK and of the African-American demon worshippers - you continually fear for this incredibly vulnerable English girl. While Stella is able to find some comfort in the journals of a long-deceased relative named Mado, you wonder where she can turn for help as she unintentionally stirs up a very dark hornet's nest. You know Honoria, the "maid", is a spiritual powerhouse, but is she strong enough? Will Stella's husband come back in time? Will anyone else intervene for her?

Via this very difficult set of circumstances, L'Engle is attempting to prove out Mado's point that only when love has had to go through the burning of the sun is it pure. Before it goes through such fire, it is filled with impurities and deception. But who has the courage to undergo such trials? L'Engle's characters - especially Honoria and Mado - give one courage. And, throughout this book, L'Engle brings in small poems that pierce the heart. I'm not usually much of one for poetry, but I copied these into my journals as keep-sakes.

A must-read for every L'Engle fan and for anyone who is looking for a book to take you a bit out of your comfort zone.

Innocence can be a deadly thing. So Stella Renier, nineteen-year-old bride from England, learns when she reaches her new husband's home in South Carolina. It's 1910, and the veterans of the War Between the States are growing old. Yet the conflicts that war failed to resolve - along with some new ones created by its aftermath - simmer just below the surface of the coastal community surrounding the house called Illyria. That house will become the one place Stella regards as home throughout her married life, which is destined to be long. We know this because elderly and recently widowed Stella narrates the story for her adult grandson, during another era of turmoil in the American South. But in 1910, as she comes to Illyria without the husband she's barely had time to wed - sent to his family while Terry Renier sets off on a secret assignment for his employer, the U.S. State Department - it's a fantastic house in an alien country. And her husband's family are, of course, strangers.

How can Stella, who grew up at Oxford, understand the basics of keeping herself safe in a place where she's expected to treat the first Negroes she has ever met as if they were members of a different species? How can the girl reared by an agnostic father grasp the conflict between the powerful Christian faith of Honoria, a one-time African princess who takes care of everyone at Illyria, and the dark spirits invoked by the "Granddam" in the desperately impoverished black hamlets just inland from the beachfront homes of the Reniers? Stella doesn't even know the significance of robed horsemen who ride by night. But her husband's people all know it. And so does the English-educated black physician whose danger she increases with every innocent gesture of friendship.

"The Other Side of the Sun" is a book to read through to the end, and then read again. It has much to say about the nature of faith, of fate, of aging, and of human love. But most of all, it's a well-told and compelling story about characters as real as any I've ever met on the printed page.

--Reviewed by Nina M. Osier, author of "Love, Jimmy: A Maine Veteran's Longest Battle"

I am a Madeleine L'Engle fan and this is my favorite book ever.

The story is told through the eyes of Stella a woman in her eighties returning to her beach home in the deep south.
She tells of first coming there as a newly married young bride from England in 1910. The place is beautiful and wild and completely out of her realm of experience. Her words touch a place at the depths of the soul.
She has married in to the Renier family a genteel, old money southern family and must get to know them in her husbands absense. The charecters are rich and exotic and well developed. One of these is Mado the grandmother whose influence is still quite strong and whose wisdom, fortitude and love remain though she no longer lives. The housekeeper Honoria,an African woman of royal bearing, is full of goodness and peaceful strength. There is also the eccentric but lovable Aunties who live in the past, quote Shakespeare and other literary greats and argue with one another.

There is intrigue and mystery as well as an element of danger threatening to errupt in to violence. It becomes clear the destrutive nature of hatred can not be taken for granted.
The story has the quality of being haunting and lovely and upliftingly joyous. It is a journey of love, tragedy and triumph, of "loves terrible other side", the other side of the sun. It captures the Era of the Post Civil War South in all of it's turbulence and beauty and includes all the ingredients that make a great story. What ever type of reading you prefer, what ever authors you enjoy this book is for you, this story transcends preferences.

The Other Side of the Sun was one of the first books that actually made me really cry. I didn't just get teary-eyed, I sobbed. It is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read, and it tells a story filled with both wonderful, and terrible events. The book teaches so much and is so unique-like all of Madeleine L'Engle's books. It reminds me of Ilsa, another of her books that is really hard to find. The Other Side of the Sun is filled with characters you will fall in love with and others that you will hate. It is extraordinary.

I read this book before I was able to truly appreciate the underlying messages Ms. L'Engle puts in all her books, and mainly focused on the formula she tends to follow in her storylines: an innocent, unknowing soul is caught in the middle of horrendous intrigue, and a young man who "shouldn't" die is killed. I was not prepared for *how* that young man died; it rocked me to the core so badly, I threw the book across the room. I still burst into tears every time I read it... and I re-read my Madeline L'Engle collection a *lot* (she comforts and teaches me every time). _The Other Side of the Sun_ has the clearest message of most of her adult fiction: having a loving heart in this cruel world is not easy, but it is worth it.

I read this to get my 800 pages/quarter for English class, and it couldn't have been more worth it. I picked it up off the shelf because I was a L'engle fan and a sucker for titles, and haven't looked back since. It's a fantastic window into a world I've never thought about, insight into the life of someone different from yet similar to myself and a brilliant, touching perspective on the power of love, hate and their intertwining. Now I consider myself a L'engle addict!!! The characters are so brilliant, powerful, realistic and SPECIAL. It's really heart wrenching @ the end, beyond all prediction or comprehension!! don't miss it for the world.

This book is excellent. Being an early fan of Madeline L'engle sparked by by her book A Wrinkle In Time I have found that I love her books. I gobbled up those that I could secure from the library and bookstores. The Other Side of the Sun is without a doubt my favorite though. It shows a classic example of post-war South. The loss of the belles, the balls, and control of society by white landowners. And the fear mantained by some.

Thsi is book a wonderful discovery I made. I love L'Engle, she is a phenomenal author with quick wit, and a mixture of science, faith: always a great story. This novel is no different. I loved the imagery and the setting: a beach in turn of the century South Carolina. The story centers around Stella, the young British bride of Terry, her American husband. She is sent to live with his family in South Carolina, as Terry goes off on a secret mission for the US State Department. Since it is the south and it is the turn of the century, the civil war and it's aftermath is as much of character as the people themselves.
Stella soon discovers that Terry's family is not all it seems and as she gets to know them and they her, she discovers some horrible past experiances and secrets that arre still effecting the family today. The novel is full of wit, literary refernces: Her Great Aunts play a wonderful guess the quote game. However, it has a very dark side and only after she has gone through love's terrible side can she and the famlliy come out on the other side of the sun. I can not reccomend this book enough!

Like many other reviewers, I was exposed to Madeleine L'Engle's work through "A Wrinkle in Time." I have reread most of her Children's work and then started through her Adult work. While "The Small Rain" (her first novel) and "A Severed Wasp" (one of her last novels) were excellent and well-written, nothing prepared me for the brilliance and imagination of "The Other Side of the Sun." Right from the first chapter I was drawn into the fascinating story of the post-civil war south and all its lingering conflicts. I found all the characters completely believeable and compelling, especially Honoria and the Aunties. Even minor characters were completely fleshed out and interesting.

I found myself newly fascinated with the Author. What kind of a person can dream up such a complex and beautiful storyline and fill it with such amazing characters? The complex story never became predictable or trite. What a refreshing and thoroughly entertaining piece of work. In my mind, it is L'Engle's best.

An elderly widow, Stella Renier, returns from her husband's funeral to her family in the American South. Before facing the rest of the family she and her grandson spend some time together at the family's coastal estate, Illyria, where she relates to him the story of her arrival there as a young bride many years before. Stella had traveled to Illyria to await her husband's return from a mysterious and dangerous mission. She found herself struggling to understand both the alien cultures of the antebellum South with it's strict and confusing rules and the family with it's long history and many secrets. She finds help in the most surprising places including her husband's long dead grandmother.

For those familiar with L'Engle's other works this one does not feature either the Murray/O'Keefe or the Austin families of her more well known works. The Renier family is alluded to, though, in some of these works. As always with L'Engle's works the characters are compeling, drawing the reader into the complexities of their lives, eliciting first a smile at their eccentricities and then a tear at their sorrows.

This lesser known work is a treat for a L'Engle fan or a wonderful introduction to this marvelous author, in either case it is a story that will stay with the reader long after the last page.