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A review by melissa_who_reads
A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L'Engle
4.0
A book about writing, in many ways - and as such, it was a perfect book for me to read now.
There is a little nag about it, knowing that her children disliked the Crosswicks books, felt they did not tell the truth of their times there - but I think Madeleine is quite open about what she's doing. She's not writing a memoir: early in the book, she tells a story about some "new people" and one of the old villagers in their town in Connecticut, to it's affecting ending ... and then tells us that it isn't totally true. There were people like that, sort of, but the events didn't quite happen like that. But writing the story made her feel better about what was going on in her town. And I think the rest of it is like that: her using stories of her life, and making them fit the point she is trying to make, whether they really do or not. She was an only child and a lonely child, who often didn't fit in at school, and used writing to escape those realities and make sense of what was happening around her. I think she used her writing this way all her life, and that it is one reason it is so often very good: there is an element of truth behind the writing, of trying to make sense of very difficult times.
I think she is better at explaining God in her fiction - like A Wrinkle in Time - than in her prose. It is amazing to me that she wrote this book at age 51, younger than I am now, and at that time was a grandmother and had moved into the adult children phase of her life. She is a little condescending, I think, to the young adults of that time - around 1970 - but she is also truly fearful of the chaotic world they are living in. And while the concerns are somewhat different today than then, some of that fear of the chaos and darkness resonates in this world of pandemic and creeping fascism we live in today.
There is a little nag about it, knowing that her children disliked the Crosswicks books, felt they did not tell the truth of their times there - but I think Madeleine is quite open about what she's doing. She's not writing a memoir: early in the book, she tells a story about some "new people" and one of the old villagers in their town in Connecticut, to it's affecting ending ... and then tells us that it isn't totally true. There were people like that, sort of, but the events didn't quite happen like that. But writing the story made her feel better about what was going on in her town. And I think the rest of it is like that: her using stories of her life, and making them fit the point she is trying to make, whether they really do or not. She was an only child and a lonely child, who often didn't fit in at school, and used writing to escape those realities and make sense of what was happening around her. I think she used her writing this way all her life, and that it is one reason it is so often very good: there is an element of truth behind the writing, of trying to make sense of very difficult times.
I think she is better at explaining God in her fiction - like A Wrinkle in Time - than in her prose. It is amazing to me that she wrote this book at age 51, younger than I am now, and at that time was a grandmother and had moved into the adult children phase of her life. She is a little condescending, I think, to the young adults of that time - around 1970 - but she is also truly fearful of the chaotic world they are living in. And while the concerns are somewhat different today than then, some of that fear of the chaos and darkness resonates in this world of pandemic and creeping fascism we live in today.