The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

Rating:
Summary: A gentle disappointment
Review: Having read and loved "A Circle of Quiet" (the first of four in the Crosswicks Journals) I had high hopes for this second volume. Curiously, though, this book made me reconsider continuing with the series. L'engle's accounts of her extended family read like historical revisionism -- does any extended family function as well as she claims? I would think a creative and brilliant group of people probably clash more than this book would suggest.

As with "A Circle of Quiet" there are little gems along the way -- L'engle is a gifted writer, and reading her thoughts is a privledge. Overall, though, I found her style dispassionate and erudite, not what I would have expected from a personal memoir.

Rating:
Summary: A gentle disappointment
Review: Having read and loved "A Circle of Quiet" (the first of four in the Crosswicks Journals) I had high hopes for this second volume. Curiously, though, this book made me reconsider continuing with the series. L'engle's accounts of her extended family read like historical revisionism -- does any extended family function as well as she claims? I would think a creative and brilliant group of people probably clash more than this book would suggest.

As with "A Circle of Quiet" there are little gems along the way -- L'engle is a gifted writer, and reading her thoughts is a privledge. Overall, though, I found her style dispassionate and erudite, not what I would have expected from a personal memoir.

Rating:
Summary: My Grandmother, too
Review: I have lived with my grandmother for two and a half years, watching her slowly slip farther into senility. L'Engle's narrative of her mother's last summer connected with me -- it was helpful to hear another's struggles, and to know I am not the only one who has prayed for the death of a loved one.

My grandmother is gone: she was an artist, a world-traveller, a cook. Now, she does not know me, she doesn't remember her children (except my aunt who has been a constant in her life), she can't "do for herself" anymore. I just want her to have life back. I was touched by the way L'Engle put that --to be born again through death.

I also enjoyed hearing about the life of two fascinating and wonderful women, both L'Engle and her mother. The book is a substantial, warm, human look into L'Engle's thoughts and her family.

Rating:
Summary: My Grandmother, too
Review: I have lived with my grandmother for two and a half years, watching her slowly slip farther into senility. L'Engle's narrative of her mother's last summer connected with me -- it was helpful to hear another's struggles, and to know I am not the only one who has prayed for the death of a loved one.

My grandmother is gone: she was an artist, a world-traveller, a cook. Now, she does not know me, she doesn't remember her children (except my aunt who has been a constant in her life), she can't "do for herself" anymore. I just want her to have life back. I was touched by the way L'Engle put that --to be born again through death.

I also enjoyed hearing about the life of two fascinating and wonderful women, both L'Engle and her mother. The book is a substantial, warm, human look into L'Engle's thoughts and her family.

Rating:
Summary: Great journal of decline and death
Review: I'm a big fan of Madeleine L'Engle's non-fiction (regrettably, I have not yet read any of her fiction); I began with Walking on Water, and then moved on to A Circle of Quiet, from which I arrived here, at The Summer of the Great-Grandmother. There are themes that carry over from Walking and Circle, but for the most part, Summer is a different animal altogether.

Like A Circle of Quiet, the book is autobiographical and takes place at "Crosswicks," the L'Engle/Franklin home in Connecticut. As the title indicates, L'Engle's mother, freshly a great-grandmother, is living with them, and her health and cognitive ability is swiftly declining. Throughout the book--really, like A Circle of Quiet, a collection of journal entries--the author deals with losing the mother that she used to know to senility and incontinence, as well as the effects and ramifications of death.

I've never had anyone close to me die, so I can't relate to this book as much as I could to A Circle of Quiet or Walking on Water, but it's superbly written (L'Engle's words always seem to be alive and breathing), and I imagine that it would be a great comfort to those who are dealing with death.

Rating:
Summary: A story of strength and the importance of family history.
Review: L'Engle confronts issues of death and dying in her experience of the death of her mother. But she also confronts issues of family history and the strength that the women in her family's history have exhibited. With each page I gained a greater respect for the trials that my ancestors have endured, and a greater curiosity to discover who my ancestors really were. The importance of story and passing on wisdom shines through L'Engle's account of her family experience. It explains why we should all feel compelled to pass on our history; to give our children deep roots so that they can understand themselves

Rating:
Summary: Essays on Family, aging, and caretaking.
Review: Many middle aged women are the sandwich generation, caught in between caring for their children and their elderly mothers. L'Engle has written about being a mother and the meaning of family in her Crosswick Journal series. This one, however, is about the roots of the family, with its memories, and the passing of the generations. It is also about the heartbreaking labor and burden of caring for the elderly. But this memoir, which combines the stories of her ancestors' strengths in struggles, places these stories as a context in which one contemplates the problems of age, the struggles of feeding and caring for one at the end of life. The result is a satisfying string of essays into the eternal meaning of Family.

Rating:
Summary: A lovely tribute
Review: This is a lovely book that underscores the potential beauty of death as well as our responsiblity to the dying. Madeline writes this book as a tribute to her mother and to her mother's life during the summer that her mother lays dying in Madeline's Crosswicks home. The book has very strong echoes (read repetitive)of A Circle of Quiet and therefore should not be read immediately after reading that one. While I found her story interesting and sometimes fascinating, I did get bogged down in some of her listings of her family tree. But this was overall another lovely book that was thouroughly Madeline

Rating:
Summary: A lovely tribute
Review: This is a lovely book that underscores the potential beauty of death as well as our responsiblity to the dying. Madeline writes this book as a tribute to her mother and to her mother's life during the summer that her mother lays dying in Madeline's Crosswicks home. The book has very strong echoes (read repetitive)of A Circle of Quiet and therefore should not be read immediately after reading that one. While I found her story interesting and sometimes fascinating, I did get bogged down in some of her listings of her family tree. But this was overall another lovely book that was thouroughly Madeline