Imagine for just a moment that you're the parent of a teenage girl, a very smart teenage girl who is not getting the kind of education she needs at her high school. You decide to send your daughter off to spend some time studying with your parents who happen to be genius scientists. Now... Imagine a boy, a boy you don't know from Adam, shows up at your house wanting to see your daughter. A boy, a college boy, mind you, who says he has just driven from one coast to the other for the sole purpose

“Okay, Polly,” her grandfather said. “Let’s have some normal, ordinary lesson time. What is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle?” Reading the following books in a series when the first book is your favourite book of all time is a scary process. Every new book has a chance to ruin the first one for you. When I started reading this one, I thought that was it. Luckily, this book seems to be made of two parts: the first is boring, preachy, made of 90% useless dialogue and feels like the author was ju...

Okay, so how many times have I read the four books that proceeds this and still managed to be completely unaware of the existence of this one? Picked from my sister's bookshelf and devoured over a quick excursion home for Christmas, I could never quite shake the feeling that this was a bit of a step down from the other four. Polly just isn't nearly as compelling a character as her mother or her uncles (though she does grow on you), Alex could very well be L'Engle's most relentlessly tiresome cre...

In An Acceptable Time, Polly is alright as a character but I kind of felt like I was missing half the story (that might be because this book takes place after three other books that aren’t considered part of the quintet) and sometimes her response to some of the events seemed flimsy and came with little to no explanation. Maybe if I read the other novels that come before this one chronologically I’d connect more with Polly, but that’s what I thought about Meg and after the first book you don’t g...

The last book of this series was such a disappointment. An Acceptable Time is about Polly’s adventure into the prehistory of the druids. She gets mesmerized by a guy who is like no other while out on a study break. She, of course, crossed the time gate into the past. Polly and her best friend Zachary are on this silly adventure. Now throughout this story, I was bored. Like really really bored. Everything was predictable and unoriginal. Again, I was really bored. I think this might my least favor...

My ‘experiment’ of reading the rest of the books in L’Engle’s “Time” series that I hadn’t read as a child (that is, all of them except A Wrinkle in Time) has come to an end. I’d wanted to see how they compared to the first book. While they all have merit—L’Engle is a consummate story teller—none came close to the first, at least not for me. Whether that’s because I read and loved the first one as a child, I’ll never know.I feel the biggest reason the other books are not as good as Wrinkle is tha...

An Acceptable Time does have a good message. It teaches truth in that integrated, mostly-subtle way that good books should, and in this is similar to the other books in the "Time" "Series." (If, indeed, a series it really can be called...) The difference is that this book is boring. Yes, it continues the story of the Murry clan, and yes, it involves druids and blood sacrifice and time travel, (in a way quite parallel to A Swiftly Tilting Planet) and yes, it does eventually get around to a nice s...

This book was just okay. Maybe I'm a bit meh about Christian fantasy/sf in general, or specifically, but I did enjoy the moments of particle physics and the apologia for all things Jesus. (Sure, time travel is fine because even though you're going back a thousand years before the time of Christ, his spirit is eternal, etc., etc.)MAYBE I would have liked this a lot more if it hadn't been super-primitive societies performing ritual sacrifice and we're supposed to go back and civilize the bastards....

This is a *mess*. Where to begin...... Okay, first Polly O'Keefe goes to live with her grandparents, and Zachary Grey *blech* keeps stopping by, and of course there's a rift in the space-time continuum, but her grandparents, whom you thought you knew so well from other books, have trouble believing such things could be happening...... what? Did L'Engle forget that Alex Murry himself went through a tesseract to Camazotz???? Most of this book consists of the adults worrying about what *might* happ...

Still one of my L'Engle favorites. I like a good dose of time travel & a little potential romance. I love the idea of going for a swim in your grandparents' indoor pool (what!?) and slipping into the past effortlessly. I love the odd life of privilege all these Murry/O'Keefe family members live. In some ways, reading these books again has been somewhat of a disappointment. I can see through them a little better than I could as a teen. I recognize I like the ones with a touch of romance better th...

I'm not even sure where to start with this book. While I enjoyed the rest of this series for the most part, this book left me baffled with how bad it was. I might not have minded so much if the characters hadn't been so bad and everything so contradictory. *Zach gives Polly a statue of a saint and sees her still carrying it* Zach: you have my icon so you care about me so I'm totally justified in kidnapping you. Uhhh... what?*Polly falls for warrior who wants to sacrifice her* Polly: I really wan...

*gasps in relief*That went so much better than I expected it to. Still not sure whether it should be three or four stars... probably three stars... but we'll give it 3.5 in my post-Many Waters relief. Towards the end I caught the same strains that pulsed through A Wrinkle in Time, and, to a lesser degree, A Wind in the Door, that got lost in the other books - the same song that echoes in a Greater Story. But...ZACHARY IS (view spoiler)[ ABSOLUTELY AWFUL. BEYOND AWFUL. UGH. But if it wasn't for h...

This was an okay story, but it seemed like the Murrys had changed? They get all upset and protective about Polly and this time gate thing, and they don't believe her or Bishop at first. Like your kids did weirder things than this and you were fine with it! Is it because it's not Meg or Charles Wallace this time??? I was so confused by their attitude. Then there's Zach, apparently Polly meets him in some other book but I didn't have time to read it and it really didn't seem that necessary. Zach w...

4.5 🌟An Acceptable Time is the final book in the Wrinkle in Time series. This was my second favorite book of the series just behind A Swiftly Tilting Planet. There were vivid images of perfect fall days filled with family and comfort food. The plot tackled themes of time travel, honor, love, war, and religion. At times the story was slow moving, but was still a great escape filled with thought provoking scenes.

This amazing novel by Madeleine L'Engle is set during Autumn, which is my favorite season,and involves time travel, explores different questions about faith, doubt, and God, Celtic and Native American culture and spirituality, the Ogham language, themes of courage, surrender, and most importantly, the agape love of Christ. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and highly recommend it.

*Will update once I reread the series*

In keeping with my habit of reading novel series in the wrong order (see Margaret J. Anderson, passim), I've just followed my reading of the first volume in L'Engle's Time Quintet with a reading of the fifth. Next up is likely (for arcane reasons) to be the fourth . . .Teenaged Polly O'Keefe, eldest child of Calvin and Meg from A Wrinkle in Time, is staying with her genius-scientist Murry grandparents in order to get some studying done away from the sibling horde at home. One day Zachary Gray, w...

I read this entire series recently because I missed it as a child, and while as an adult I hated it, I still feel pretty safe thinking I'd have hated it as a kid, too.The problems are too many for me to go into (crappy character development for these irritating goody-goodies without any flaws, abrupt endings, repetitive moral garbage), but I suppose the main problem is... they're just boring. Every book in this series, boring boring, so utterly boring. So dull. So sad and dull.Things happen, I g...

An Acceptable Time: it only took until the last book in the series, but I actually really liked this one.I mean, don't get me wrong, it's still coloured with L'Engle's weird brand of things. Particularly her weird approach to romantic and sexual relationships. But, things were better this time around. Primarily because Polly was aware of how awful Zachary was, and straight up just stopped interacting with him. I also feel like it didn't suffer from the weird colonial tones of A Swiftly Tilting P...

An Acceptable Time by Madeleine L'Engle, also known as, If You Thought It'd Be Less Racist in Book Five, You Were Desperately Mistaken, but Don't Worry, That Takes a Backseat to RAMPANT ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIPS This Time! Also, Did All My Old Mains Forget Their Own Canon or Is It Just the Same Old Hypocrisy I've Written Into My Past Three Books? (Do you really want to read to find out?)Alright, let's take a step back here after this absolute mess of a series. I said that I always enjoyed the fifth