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

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Summary: A Story That Transcends Preferences, a story for everyone!
Review: 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.

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Summary: A book to read through to the end, and then read again.
Review: 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"

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Summary: Superb reading. Well worth any wait.
Review: 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.