Rating: 
Summary: Literary science fiction with a dash of mysticism
Review: This may be considered a young adult novel, but that does no justice to the complexity and depth of this amazing work. Part of the Time Trilogy- which has, incidentally, expanded beyond three books- A Swiftly Tilting Planet provides a rare blend of mysticism, science, and characters so real you want to call them and ask what happened next. The basic plot is thus: Meg Murray communicates telepathically with her brother, Charles Wallace, as he enters the bodies of several people from the past to avert a world disaster. As always, L'Engle is superb. I highly encourage any human, of any age, to read this fine novel
Rating:
Summary: the best book i ever read
Review: this book, like all of madeleine l'engles books is an exlent piece of work. it made me laugh, cry, and most of all fall in love with it's realistic charcters. i have read it so many times that i know it by heart. even now that i have moved on to more "grown up " books, i still enjoy reading it from time to time, and it still makes me cry all over agin
Rating:
Summary: fantastic book!
Review: This book is full of adventures and magic. Anyone who likes fantasy books would really enjoy this one! Make sure you buy the other books in this series. You might want to start with the first book, to understand it better.
Rating:
Summary: My absolute favorite
Review: Out of the Time Quarter, this is my favorite, although I still haven't read Many Waters, yet.In A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Charles Wallace must go through time and "inhabit" the bodies of various men, might-have-beens, to somehow alter the course of the present and prevent nuclear war. I loved the concept on how everything is connected and how each of the people Charles Wallace inhabitted through each time period were all interrelated. The story ties each person in to the next, crossing thousands of years and showing how one decision from each person can change the future of the world. It was fascinating to go back in time and experience what it was like during the Salem witch trials, the civil war, the early 20th century. It was like I was going through someone's attic and finding all this history or like I was going on an archeological dig, finding out about the past centuries. I felt like I was actually with Charles Wallace, as if I was actually Meg, Charles's sister, watching him travel through time to save the planet. After reading A Wrinkle in Time, and then this one, I must say that there is a marked improvement in Madeline L'Engle's writing and this book captures you and takes you away to the world of the Murray's to the point that you lose all track of time in the real world.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I just re-read A SWIFTLY TILTING PLANET after many, many years of walking past it on my bookshelf. In the meanwhile I've completed graduate work in Medieval studies, specialized (somewhat) in Medieval Celtic culture, and read THE MABINOGION more than once. It seems a shame that L'Engle did not do even a minimum amount of homework for this novel. The story was not bad, less snobbish than many of hers, but fatally flawed by errors. I feel that the scholarship behind writing for young adults needs to be especially cautious and error-free.
First, when L'Engle wrote this book did she know anything about Mendelian genetics? Blue eyes in an overwhelmingly dark-brown eyed population would have disappeared very rapidly, certainly by the third generation--unless (horrors) they practiced incest.
Next, some comments on the Welsh background. Owain Gwynedd was a real king of North Wales, a very important king who lived in the 12th century. He was NOT a pagan but a Christian., yet L'Engle made his son Madoc or Madog non-Christian in belief. Certainly there were many pre-Christian elements in 12th century Welsh society--but Madoc would never have kept referring to "the gods" and would have prayed to Christ and the saints.
The Madoc-Indian story is an old one, perfectly acceptable in a fantasy, but L'Engle ruins the Branwen story! The Branwen tale in THE MABINOGION is not the sweet rather sad story told by Beezie's (Irish!) Grandma. It describes a truly sadistic, vengeful, gory, "ethnic cleansing" war between North Wales and Ireland in which everyone in Ireland is killed except five (pregnant) Irish women. Such a tale would hardly be passed down in Ireland, not even in L'Engle's wildly cleaned-up version--and why would an Irish king flee from Ireland by ship anyway? If the original story was supposed to have become garbled over the years, then L'Engle should have explained that.
Does L'Engle know how to pronounce Spanish and Welsh? I doubt it. As a result, the name "Branzillo" made little sense. Granting that "Zilla" is supposed to be a (rather unlikely) Native American name, the /ll/ might have been pronounced "ull" as in English if the Llawcaes spoke English as their home tongue. But if the Llawcaes spoke Welsh they would have heard and spelled the name not "Zilla" but "Sila." There is no /z/ in Welsh. Even more important, the /l/ sound in Welsh, from Medieval times, has been /l/. Welsh /ll/ is a very complex phoneme, a faint sibilant plus /th/ plus /f/ plus /l/. In Welsh, "Zilla" would be pronounced something like "Sithfla." The Spanish /ll/ is just as troublesome. In Spain and Venezuela it is "lyuh", in the rest of Spanish America the pronunciation is "yuh." "Branzillo" would be pronounced in South American Spanish "Bronzeeyo." How can any of these names be connected "by ear"? They can't.
Sorry, that's just too much carelessness.
Rating:
Summary: Just too weird
Review: I read the first two books, and they were very weird, but I still liked them all right and would have given them 3-4 stars. This one was just TOO weird. I completely didn't understand parts of it and abandoned it about halfway through. Very challenging and not highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Near the top of her game.
Review: When Madeline L'Engle is on, her stories are both strange and familiar. Strange, because the plot involves -- in this case -- unicorns that ride through time and space, devils, psychic mixing of personalities, and the possible end of the world. Familiar, because the story is rooted in family, not the Simpsons or Archie Bunkers, but a loving home of scientists, artists, a tail-thumping black dog, (named Ananda -- not for the disfunctional Hindu sect of the same name) and a home that has its own, understated personality. If you read her autobiographies -- she broke the rule by writing more than one -- it turns out that a lot of this comes out of her own rich life of love and relationships. (Her husband, like one of the characters here, ran a country store.)
I liked this book. I liked the way the hero touches down in different epochs at the same place, the "star-gazing rock" and the surrounding valley and forest. We visit the place during the Ice Ages, early tribal periods, the colonial era, and earlier modern eras, following the story of a mixed and dangerously balanced family through time. As it happens, the fortunes of that family will effect the future, or lack thereof, of planet earth, and it all depends (as in Ray Bradbury's story of the butterfly) on choices made in the distant past, that perhaps can be unmade.
Admittedly, the book has a few weaknesses. I think L'Engle exagerates how common witch hunting was in the American colonies, and mistakes how it was conducted. (As far as I know, professional witch hunters were rare; most of it came from hysterical teenage girls.) Also, making the villain with doomsday nukes a South American dictator seems a little odd -- where did any South American country come up with such a massive stockpile, presumably with all the missiles? And the "good" family line versus the "bad" line is of course a very problematic theme.
But L'Engle can be forgiven for letting her muse get out of control occasionally. Her descriptions of nature can be beautiful ("as each flaming sun turned on its axis, a singing came from the friction in the way a finger moved around the rim of a crystal goblet . . . and the song varies in pitch and tone from glass to glass"), her characters are likeable (it can't be easy to make a unicorn come to life), the story engages interesting ideas, and most of all, there is a purity or goodness here that makes me feel at home.
Rating: 
Summary: a mixed bag
Review: In this sequel to "A Wrinkle in Time," the Murray family is again called upon to save the world: a mad South American dictator is threatening nuclear annihilation. Charles Wallace, brilliant, telepathic, and youngest of the Murrays, meets a unicorn and goes on a trip back in time to avert catastrophe.
In various past eras, Charles Wallace enters a succession of host minds via his telepathy and witnesses a sequence of events, trying to grasp the situation. It boils down to a primal conflict of two patriarchs: two brothers, one good, one evil, fought (shades of Cain and Abel?) Except here, the good one kills the evil one. But both brothers sire children, and their descendants continue on down the centuries. Charles Wallace must discover their relation to the mad dictator, and how he must change the past.
Understanding this process is made difficult by L'Engle's complicated naming scheme. We're introduced to at least twenty different characters, and many of them have names which differ only by a couple of letters. L'Engle's point, I suppose, is that good and evil can sometimes be so akin as to be barely distinguishable. However, it hampers the reader's ability to sort out what is already a disjointed story.
L'Engle means well, but there are several things about her world that are bogus. First, the protagonists are allowed to go back in time to change the past. Perhaps L'Engle is making a comment about divine providence--but you can't just go back and change the past, even to avoid global nuclear holocaust. In real life, we have to accept the situation we're in and clean up the messes we've made, and teaching kids otherwise probably isn't a good idea. Also, there's no dealing with the ethical consequences of time travel; although even the smallest change in the past would have innumerable effects on everyone's lives, not all of them good, this problem of time travel isn't even mentioned.
Second, the Murrays are all brilliant: the father's a Nobel Prize level physicist, the mother a distinguished biologist, Charles Wallace has superhuman intelligence and psychic powers, Meg is a math whiz, etc. This is the dearest fantasy of all clever science nerd kids who've ever felt misunderstood by their family and peers. It leads to a sense of us (the smart people) vs. them (the dumb people). Granted, in this book, L'Engle introduces Mrs. O'Keefe, Calvin's mother, who appears vulgar, uneducated and bitter, but who turns out to be the key to saving the world. Nonetheless, the "family of geniuses" idea, besides being done to death, doesn't seem healthy, and it's a problem with this book as it is with all of L'Engle's books that I've read.
Otherwise, the book is pretty good for kids: it's surprisingly mature in its depiction of evil: greed, intolerance, and the violence that results when people give in to their fears without thinking. And the Thanksgiving feast and cheerful, affectionate banter of the Murray clan are a welcome contrast. But for the reasons mentioned above, I can't recommend it without reservation.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but not the best.
Review: The narrative is a bit confused, and the jump in ages between this book and the previous ones in the series--one wants to know what happened in between!--is a problem, but it is still worth reading.
To answer the reader who objected to Meg's putting her scientific career 'on hold' to be a wife and mother, L'Engle herself said that she did this because (a) there were a lot of children's and young adult books coming out at the time which had strong female characters choosing a career, but that (b) feminism was supposed to be about CHOICE, and she wanted to portray a strong female who CHOSE wifehood/motherhood as her vocation, as opposed to on the one hand who chose a professional career or on the other hand fell into the wife/mother role by default.
Rating:
Summary: Buy or borrow this book! But make it the book! NOT the tape!
Review: A Wrinkle in Time was one of my favorite books ever, so I read the sequals with much anticipation. This book was a little disappointing mainly because Meg and Charles Wallace are not featured that often. Most of the book revolves around a historical family, one side bad and one good, and the attempt to go back in time and change the outcome of events in order to prevent war in the present. The time travelling aspect is interesting, and the talking unicorn is very lovable, but I just did not find these historical characters very interesting. Also did not care for the idea that one family line can be inherently bad. Still an enjoyable read, and L'engle has many heartfelt quotations, and Meg's family is still as loving and inspirational. I was also disappointed that Meg has lost her spunkiness. But I guess that is just part of growing up, and she is growing up into a beautiful woman, just like her mother.
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