An Acceptable Time

Rating:
Summary: this book is pretty good
Review: Polly, a teen aged girl, goes to her grandparent's house for a while to learn about space and time travel. There she lives at her grandparents house. She goes out one morning and she suddenly gets taken back 3000 years and a group of men are coming towards her with spears. They do not hurt her, and after a couple of minutes, she is warped back to her original time. A girl from 3000 years ago came to polly's time and had been doing for quite a while. Polly finds herselfstuck in an odd situation and finds she plays an important role in time. This book is pretty good, but it is not fast moving and sometimes boring. The book has extremely excellent descriptive properties. The book is based on the Murry and O'keefe families so if you have read other books by L'engle it adds a little spice to the book. it is very interesting and really makes you think, I mean, 3000 years? That's a long time to be just warpin' back to!!!

Rating:
Summary: Lovely - Madeleine L'Engle at her best
Review: This is a wonderful book about Poly and her journeys through time. She learns to forgive and love, and to trust in herself and her friends. A must read.

Rating:
Summary: THIS IS A MUST READ !!
Review: An acceptable time is, in my oppinion, one of her best books. Poly O'keefes journeys through time are really interesting to read about. When I started reading this book, I couldn't stop!

Rating:
Summary: L'Engle best fantasy
Review: For me, this is one of those books that had, and keeps having, a huge positive impact. Yes, this is a time-travel tale, but more than that, it is a story about the kinds of sacrifice love is willing to make. Nobody gets beat over the head with the lesson here, but it will stick with you. Heads up: parts of this will be pretty heavy going for younger/more sensitive juvenile readers as blood sacrifice is discussed pretty frankly (though not at all graphically) here.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Adventure From Start to Finish
Review: When Polly O'Keefe goes to stay with her grandparents, doctors Kate and Alex Murry, she expects life to be fairly sedentary. Kate is a microbiologist and a Nobel Prize laureate, and Alex is an astrophysicist studying the space/time continuum. Polly has come to live with them to study for a few months. However, life at the Murry residence isn't quite what Polly expected it to be. Far from being quiet and relaxing, strange things begin to happen, with no believable reason behind them.

With an earthquake and a brilliant flash of lightning, everything Polly has felt was certain in life, and has even taken for granted, is changed. A time gate has opened on the Murry property and three people are caught up in the tesseract's sphere of influence: Bishop Colubra, Polly, and her acquaintance Zachary. Leaving the area of its influence could well mean death for them all. The time gate leads to a period roughly three thousand years in the past. A time when people still believed in human sacrifice in order to appease the gods and bring about their desires. A time when nothing could be certain, not even the safety of love.

Bishop Colubra has found three ogam stones and believes the site of the Murrys' indoor pool was once sacred ground. His avid interest in ogam enables him to be able to speak and understand the language of the people on the other side of the time gate, and Polly is a quick study with languages. Neither had thought they would actually encounter Druids on the other side of the gate. The Druids, however, have no more control over the time gate than Polly or her companions. And their friendship may not be enough to keep Polly from becoming the next Samhain sacrifice.

Madeleine L'Engle builds the suspense up extremely well. And not everything is quite what you'd expect from the clues she expertly drops along the way. Although this book is written for children, it too is a wonderful adventure from start to finish, and complex enough to keep an adult mind occupied and guessing at the outcome. I certainly had problems putting it down for any length of time, and even when I did manage to, I was thinking about it almost constantly.

Review Originally Posted at www.linearreflections.com

Rating:
Summary: No.
Review: Unnatural dialog (does anyone actually say things like "Delightful, utterly delightful!"? According to Madeleine L'Engel, yes. Yes they do.) The characters barely feel real. A slow book with random parts that are slightly interesting.

It also strays too far from A Wrinkle In Time. Mr Murray has "tesseracted" all over the place into different dimensions in A Wrinkle In Time, and yet he has a hard time believing that Polly went back 3000 years.

Rating:
Summary: Slow, boring, hard time finishing.
Review: I really, really did not enjoy this book. It was way too dry and boring. The description was tiresome and slow and the characters didn't add to any of the already boring set-up. I have not read any of the previous books (with absolutely NO intention) so i'm not very familiar with any of the characters.

Just the book as a whole was just so.....slow. It got so annoying. The back of the book says Polly gets stuck in past, as if that's the first thing to happen. It takes 3/4th's of the book for this to occur. The ending with her best friend made no sense. This was my first fantasy book and it's a wonder i didn't stop reading books right there. Don't waste your time on this sorry excuse for a decent fantasy novel.

Rating:
Summary: An acceptable time
Review: Once again, Madeleine L'Engle manages to take us through a fantastic, yet believable world. In this novel, Polly, Meg's daughter, is spending time with her grandparents in New England, when she is suddenly transported through time to the village of a 3000-year-old culture. Polly learns to live with these people and the difficulties they are experiencing, all the while trying to figure out how to get home to her own time.

This novel weaves interesting bits of ancient history into the story, and by doing so, makes the story feel real. While reading this book, I almost felt as if I were one of the characters, experiencing the story through their eyes. L'Engle makes Polly believable as an intelligent and sympathetic character.

Rating:
Summary: More than acceptable! Find the time to read it!
Review: With "An Acceptable Time", the "Time Quartet" (beginning with the award winning "A Wrinkle in Time") became the "Time Quintet". And what a terrific addition to the series this is! This is certainly one of the more outstanding entries in the series! Unlike some of the earlier novels, it is not hampered by speculative theology or attempts at Biblical science fiction, but is very much plot driven. It features an exciting and generally plausible plot where the idea of time travel is central, carrying the suspense until the last pages. The heroine is Polly O'Keefe, daughter of Meg and Calvin. Polly is spending the summer with her grandparents, Meg's scientist parents. Using her familiar twelve-chapter formula, L'Engle describes Polly's adventures as she enters a time gate and goes back 3000 years together with her friend Zachary and her grandparents' friend Bishop Colubra.

But as Polly's grandparents remark: "Wandering about in time doesn't strike me as particularly safe." Back in time Polly finds both friends and enemies. Here she befriends Anaral, Karralys and Tav, part of the People of the Wind, who are in the grip of a tribal struggle with the People Across The Lake. As she crosses the threshhold of time on several occasions and moves through the circles of time, Polly herself becomes intimately involved in this struggle, because her blood is being sought as the necessary sacrifice in order to bring rain. Can Polly work peace between these two warring peoples? Can she bring rain and avoid sacrifice? And what role will the enigmatic Zachary play in the events that follow? These questions and more result in a spine-chingling tale of suspense and excitement.

In the process, L'Engle weaves a tale with important implications about a very real spiritual struggle: "The bright angels and the dark angels are fighting, and the earth is caught in the battle." Even the title itself is derived from Psalm 69:13. Perhaps more than in the other books, L'Engle affirms the validity of a Christian worldview and the importance of Jesus Christ: "I am not turning to the old gods. No, the God I have tried to serve all my life is still good enough for me. Christ didn't just appear as Jesus of Nazareth two thousand years ago don't forget. Christ is, will be, and certainly was ... just as much as now." Despite the assertion of the the abiding validity of Christianity, L'Engle's apparent acceptance of primitive Celtic religion is still somewhat troubling. The religion of the People of the Wind in serving "Earth Mother", "The One", "The Presence", "The Maker of the Universe" is not presented as erroneous paganism, but as a valid and simplistic shadowy form of the true religion. What particularly made me uncomfortable was the apparent legitimization of various terms and practices in this primitive religion, by the incorporation of occultic elements such as All Hallow's Eve (Samhain). As in some of the other books, there is a strange and persistent emphasis on the patterns and lines in nature, where "The stars will guide you. Trust them." Polly herself also has no clear perception about the afterlife. In my view, these elements detracted somewhat from the Christian element of the novel and a consistently Christian worldview.

Of the many important themes running through the novel, two especially struck me. Firstly, the notion of human sacrifice has obvious allusions to Christ's sacrifice. L'Engle makes this connection explicit, pointing out that the sacrificial death of Jesus was a voluntary act of love "I don't think that God demanded that Jesus shed blood unwillingly. With anguish, yes, but with love." The parallels with the human sacrifice demanded by the People Across the Lake are not fully worked out, but perhaps they are best understood as a contrast. They demand that "the sacrifice must be unblemished" in order to provide healing and rain, but ultimately the sacrifice that saves is not one that is demanded, but given freely in love. Polly's willingness to return to her captors to attempt to save Zachary typifies such selfless sacrifice. Unfortunately this important theme is not sufficiently worked out to be entirely successful. The bishop's words "It is never expedient that one man should die for the sake of the country" added to the confusion, because they seem to conflict with what John 11:50 says. Rather than focus on the gospel, L'Engle seems to focus more on the need for us to break down the barriers of division by showing selfless and sacrificial love to others.

Secondly, Zachary needs physical healing and hope because of his heart condition, and is terrified of dying. His physical condition becomes an important metaphor for his need for spiritual renewal from selfishness. "Can you say that only his physical heart was healed?" In working out this important image, L'Engle makes some important observations about the significance of the heart as the source of spiritual growth: "The rites themselves cannot give life. Indeed, they can be hollow and meaningless. The heart of the people is what gives them life or death."

These and other important spiritual themes, as well as a gripping plot, make this novel easily one of the best and most enjoyable reads in the series. There is a great deal of fantasy here, but what is cloaked in the garb of fantasy are eternal truths, and a great story to boot. It's a modern fairly tale that speaks to adults as much as it does to children, perhaps even more. So when you have some acceptable time, make sure you read it!