Rating: 
Summary: Sentiments rarely praised these days
Review: (Two Part Invention) I was touched by the way this woman thought as she entered marriage; how she considered the marriage before any other factor in life. As someone born in the last 40 years, I have honestly never heard a woman talk about her marriage in those terms. I was humbled and thought what a shame...we have lost something very special and gentle: honoring marriage. I never did, never knew anyone who did, marriage for myself and those in my circle was more of a nuisance. After two painful divorces I could finally hear Madeline's voice and everything she said made such beautiful and perfect sense. I long for that type of life and marriage and never realized all along it had to come from me. I also cried after putting the book down and a tear often comes when the book comes to mind. I always remember her thought about moving into the city - where she didn't particularly want to live - so that she could be the wife "hosting the slumber party" when they were snowed in, rather than being the wife getting the call when the husband wouldn't be coming home to the suburbs. And how she adjusted her whole sleep schedule to accomodate her husbands' late work nights. Sigh. Thank you Madeline, thank you for a voice that is not often heard.
Rating:
Summary: Sentiments rarely praised these days
Review: (Two Part Invention) I was touched by the way this woman thought as she entered marriage; how she considered the marriage before any other factor in life. As someone born in the last 40 years, I have honestly never heard a woman talk about her marriage in those terms. I was humbled and thought what a shame...we have lost something very special and gentle: honoring marriage. I never did, never knew anyone who did, marriage for myself and those in my circle was more of a nuisance. After two painful divorces I could finally hear Madeline's voice and everything she said made such beautiful and perfect sense. I long for that type of life and marriage and never realized all along it had to come from me. I also cried after putting the book down and a tear often comes when the book comes to mind. I always remember her thought about moving into the city - where she didn't particularly want to live - so that she could be the wife "hosting the slumber party" when they were snowed in, rather than being the wife getting the call when the husband wouldn't be coming home to the suburbs. And how she adjusted her whole sleep schedule to accomodate her husbands' late work nights. Sigh. Thank you Madeline, thank you for a voice that is not often heard.
Rating:
Summary: One of the most touching books I've ever read.
Review: I agree, this book is such a real treat. Ms. L'Engle is such a wonderful writer; the way she expresses things makes it all "clear". I love the way she urges you to see the beauties in life, love and happiness. This book not only inspired me to begin playing the piano again; it is the ONLY book that has ever made me cry upon putting it down. This book could change your life. Ms. L'Engle, thank you for changing my life. And Alexandra Stoddard (author), thank you also for not only changing my life, but for introducing me to such a wonderful author! :)
Rating:
Summary: One of the most touching books I've ever read.
Review: I agree, this book is such a real treat. Ms. L'Engle is such a wonderful writer; the way she expresses things makes it all "clear". I love the way she urges you to see the beauties in life, love and happiness. This book not only inspired me to begin playing the piano again; it is the ONLY book that has ever made me cry upon putting it down. This book could change your life. Ms. L'Engle, thank you for changing my life. And Alexandra Stoddard (author), thank you also for not only changing my life, but for introducing me to such a wonderful author! :)
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding inspirational book about love and marrage.
Review: I have read the book twice and Madeleine has the inspiring power to bring you into her life and show you that it is possible to find a marrage that works. It is a story of a marrage that lived through the rigors of theatrical lifestyles, compromises for family and illness, and the glorious love of family that gets us through anything. This book makes me cry and lifts me up at the same time. It is worth reading twice.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful gift I have passed along
Review: I read this book after receiving seperate recomendations by two people I trust- my sister, the English major, and my friend Jean: both had enjoyed the book a great deal. I sat down to read it after finishing a book I never quite got into, and fell immediately into the rhythm of the narrative and the language that the Author uses to tell her story. I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful Window Into A Marriage
Review: I read this book after receiving seperate recomendations by two people I trust- my sister, the English major, and my friend Jean: both had enjoyed the book a great deal. I sat down to read it after finishing a book I never quite got into, and fell immediately into the rhythm of the narrative and the language that the Author uses to tell her story. I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Even if you're not married...
Review: If you never commit yourself, you never express yourself, and yourself becomes less and less significant and decisive. Calculating selfishness is the annihilation of self. -Madeleine L'Engle, Two-Part Invention, quoting Chekov?Madeleine L'Engle, author of the beloved Newberry Award winner A Wrinkle in Time (see Orrin's review) here tells the genuinely moving story of her forty year marriage to the actor Hugh Franklin, an early star of All My Children, and of his agonizing death from cancer. The book is at its very best describing the commitment that marriage requires of people, the commitment to one another which makes so vital an institution. At one point she asks : [I]f Hugh dies first, would I ever be able to stop saying 'we' and say 'I'? I doubt it. I do not think that death can take away the fact that Hugh and I are 'we' and 'us,' a new creature born at the time of our marriage vows, which has grown along with us as our marriage has grown. Even during the times, inevitable in all marriages, when I have felt angry, or alienated, the instinctive 'we' remains. This kind of selfless devotion to another and to a relationship is so rare and precious in our ever more atomized culture, that to see two people who realize it so fully is really edifying. Oddly enough, though it is probably one of the things she is best known for, I found her religious musings less effective. Her God is entirely too much a personal God, as she seeks to justify his ways to herself. Likewise, her comparisons of Hugh to Christ, and of his cancer to the crucifixion, seemed a little over the top to me. Lastly, though Ms L'Engle seems like a perfectly decent woman, perhaps even an unusually decent one, her intermittent forays into political questions are disturbingly misguided. As she tells about a trip to China during which the United States bombed Libya and she felt compelled to apologize to people she met in the street, the reader can hardly suppress a desire to see someone dope slap her. She is after all speaking to people who live under Communist oppression, apologizing for a democracy's measured response to the provocations of another totalitarian dictatorship. But let's set these objections aside for now, and just consider the book as a portrait of a loving marriage and of the maintenance that even a love-filled marriage requires. Here it succeeds and is so successful that one wishes all young married couples, or prospective couples, would read it. She does not try to sugarcoat her life or her marriage; she presents them with all their rough spots intact. The message that comes shining through is that the life has been infinitely better because of the marriage and because that life was shared with Hugh. In one of my favorite passages she acknowledges : We were not a latter-day Heloise and Abelard, Pelleas and Melisande when we married. For one thing, the Heloises and Abelards, the Pelleases and Melisandes, do not get married and stay married for forty years. A love which depends solely on romance, on the combustion of two attracting chemistries, tends to fizzle out. The famous lovers usually end up dead. A long term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship. It is certainly not that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love. Of course, the culture tends to glorify the passionate whirlwind romance, rather than the steady committed marriage. Anyone fortunate enough to share in the latter, to enjoy true love, realizes how empty is the former. GRADE : C+
Rating: 
Summary: duet
Review: If you never commit yourself, you never express yourself, and yourself becomes less and less significant and decisive. Calculating selfishness is the annihilation of self. -Madeleine L'Engle, Two-Part Invention, quoting Chekov? Madeleine L'Engle, author of the beloved Newberry Award winner A Wrinkle in Time (see Orrin's review) here tells the genuinely moving story of her forty year marriage to the actor Hugh Franklin, an early star of All My Children, and of his agonizing death from cancer. The book is at its very best describing the commitment that marriage requires of people, the commitment to one another which makes so vital an institution. At one point she asks : [I]f Hugh dies first, would I ever be able to stop saying 'we' and say 'I'? I doubt it. I do not think that death can take away the fact that Hugh and I are 'we' and 'us,' a new creature born at the time of our marriage vows, which has grown along with us as our marriage has grown. Even during the times, inevitable in all marriages, when I have felt angry, or alienated, the instinctive 'we' remains. This kind of selfless devotion to another and to a relationship is so rare and precious in our ever more atomized culture, that to see two people who realize it so fully is really edifying. Oddly enough, though it is probably one of the things she is best known for, I found her religious musings less effective. Her God is entirely too much a personal God, as she seeks to justify his ways to herself. Likewise, her comparisons of Hugh to Christ, and of his cancer to the crucifixion, seemed a little over the top to me. Lastly, though Ms L'Engle seems like a perfectly decent woman, perhaps even an unusually decent one, her intermittent forays into political questions are disturbingly misguided. As she tells about a trip to China during which the United States bombed Libya and she felt compelled to apologize to people she met in the street, the reader can hardly suppress a desire to see someone dope slap her. She is after all speaking to people who live under Communist oppression, apologizing for a democracy's measured response to the provocations of another totalitarian dictatorship. But let's set these objections aside for now, and just consider the book as a portrait of a loving marriage and of the maintenance that even a love-filled marriage requires. Here it succeeds and is so successful that one wishes all young married couples, or prospective couples, would read it. She does not try to sugarcoat her life or her marriage; she presents them with all their rough spots intact. The message that comes shining through is that the life has been infinitely better because of the marriage and because that life was shared with Hugh. In one of my favorite passages she acknowledges : We were not a latter-day Heloise and Abelard, Pelleas and Melisande when we married. For one thing, the Heloises and Abelards, the Pelleases and Melisandes, do not get married and stay married for forty years. A love which depends solely on romance, on the combustion of two attracting chemistries, tends to fizzle out. The famous lovers usually end up dead. A long term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship. It is certainly not that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love. Of course, the culture tends to glorify the passionate whirlwind romance, rather than the steady committed marriage. Anyone fortunate enough to share in the latter, to enjoy true love, realizes how empty is the former. GRADE : C+
Rating:
Summary: Exquisite, true tale of the complications of sharing lives
Review: In creating a portrait of her life with Hugh Franklin (yes, of the soap opera), Ms. L'Engle employs a device she also uses in her fiction: cutting back and forth between times
so that the reader is at once engaged in their courtship, in
her mourning as she watches her husband die, in the bustle of their extraordinary lives. One engages in all of these at once, knowing the outcomes, suspense is not the point. When Hugh does eventually die, you have been involved in the best and worst of the marriage and feel its
centrality in the author's life. Even after multiple readings, this chapter is good for a cathartic sob. Part of the remarkable grip this book has on me is the humility of the author. She is unimpressed by her Newbery Award and tremendous
contribution to American letters, unimpressed by her
husband's fame as a television star. She is impressed, however, by their ability to share a life, to give themselves
to a family, and to balance those with maintaining their
individuality and ensuring that each of them pursued their dreams. Her priorities are clear, and without ever being strident or judgmental, this work is a gentle reminder of what is important
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