Review
"This is the summer of the great-grandmother...This is the summer after her ninetieth birthday, the summer of the swift descent." In "Summer's Beginning," during the fourth four-generation summer at Crosswicks, her family's "two-hundred-and-some-year-old farmhouse" in Connecticut, Madeleine L'Engle cares for and contemplates her mother's life. There is her mother now, the great-grandmother with atherosclerosis who is often anxious, can't remember where she is, and needs constantly increasing care. There is "The Mother I Knew," a woman who had miscarriages all over the world before her treasured first child, Madeleine, was born, the mother who never ran out of stories to tell, or classical music to play on her piano. There is "The Mother I Did Not Know," the young woman who was born during the American Civil War to a Southern family fresh with bitter memories of "lost fathers and brothers and homes and money." Throughout this touching journal, memory, pain, respect, fear, and always the daily details of life in Crosswicks Lawns merge into a haunting and lovely chronicle of a lively home filled with pets, small children, visitors, helpers, and newlyweds, the home where Great-Grandmother lives. Until "Summer's End."
-- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. --
From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen
About the Author
Madeline L'Engle, the popular author of many books for children and adults, has interspersed her writing and teaching career with raising three children, maintaining an apartment in New York and a farmhouse of charming confusion which is called "Crosswicks."