An Acceptable Time

by Madeleine L'Engle

Book Overview

An Acceptable Time, the final book in Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quintet, the series that began with the Newbery Award winner A Wrinkle in Time. While spending time with her grandparents, Alex and Kate Murry, Polly O'Keefe wanders into a time 3,000 years before her own.

"A rich and heady brew . . . fine fantasy, firmly rooted in reality.'' --Publisher's Weekly

Under their feet, the ground seemed to tremble....

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312368585
• ISBN13: 9780312368586
• Release Date: May 2007
• Publisher: Square Fish
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.3" x 7.6"
• Age Range: 10 to 14 years
• Grade Range: Grades 5 to 9

Customer Reviews

L'Engle's best fantasy

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.

This Fifth is Vintage L'Engle

The thing that first pricked my interest to read this book was a negative review about it written, I think, in a library journal. We all know that writers in library journals have axes to grind since a good review guarantees that most libraries will stock the book. Look at the [books] in libraries these days (and pity kids looking for something to read) and you'll see my point. The fact that some knucklehead didn't like this book wouldn't normally have swayed me, but like many detractors she went too far, and described it in order to slam it. Just her description of the story, which she found "far-fetched," convinced me of two things: she had no imagination, and this sounded like a great book. No, I'm not being fair to the reviewer, who perhaps simply had no taste for L'Engle's brand of fantasy, but man, did she make me want to read this book.Like many L'Engle books this one starts slow. Not put-the-book down slow but unpretentious, unassuming, making no attempt to hide the narration. No plunging into the plot, nothing blowing up, not at all Hollywood. Almost too obvious to keep reading. Almost. Almost too simple and kid-level. Almost. But a couple pages in and I couldn't put it down. An Acceptable Time ranks as one of my all-time great reading experiences, hot on the heels of L'Engle's amazing, awe-inspiring Many Waters. The sad thing is that Many Waters features as the fourth book of the Time Quartet, but no one knows that An Acceptable Time is the fifth. Take hope oh forlorn reader--you who have finished Many Waters and long for more L'Engle--another reading experience of great power and wonder yet awaits you.

The Fire Behind The Story Sparkles

An Acceptable Time is another book in the L'Engle cannon that explores truths of reality through fantasy. At times, in fact, it carries with the book a firy truth that seems more actual than reality. Polly, the red-headed heroine, is at her most interesting if not her most believable. She is, admittedly, probably too much of the traditional hero: skilled in the right areas, good, and afflicted with an interesting situation, but these character traits only improve the book. The "interesting situation" is Polly's being stuck in a link between two time circles, so that she can walk freely between Time at her grandparents' home (the Murry scientists!) and Time in the same place hundreds and hundreds of years before. The Native Americans who have always lived in the place and the Druids who have been there more recently make all of the characters unique and historical and at the same time, appropriately fantastic. The highlight of the drama, of course, is that the Time Gate is closing, and Polly's stuck on the wrong side, and even worse, she's taken for a goddess on the side she's on. This is bad only because the goddess is deemed perfect for a sacrifice... The true treasure of this story is not just its plot, which definitely kept me reading, rapt, from beginning to end. Nor was the treasure its characters, which include Canon Tallis, a unique religious friend of the Murry's, two Druids with equal power but opposing philosophies, and Zachary, the weak but interesting friend of Polly's. The true treasure of An Acceptable Time lies in the heavy examination of philosophical questions that underlies the plots. The examination of "leigh lines" to explain the somewhat random connections between people and places and things throughout the real world, the mingling of Christian and ancient religious thought, and the astounding ideas of time, however fantastic, all create a fire behind the story that draws the reader not only to read once, but once again.

A wonderful fantasy book by the one and only!

Madeleine Langle is Classic, and so are her books. I am a fan of hers, my first being A Wrinkle in Time. This book was strikingly wonderful with interesting facts of science, and history. Not only does this open up your imagination, but you learn from it too. This story has a lot to do with time lapses and going back 5,000 years ago to a tribe a peaceful living people called The People of The Wind. On an accident of walking around, Polly gets mixed in an issue concerning two times, sacrifice, love, and the change of history, possibly. It's a mind boggler and a wonderful book to read. I really recommend people to give it a try. Try everything once within reason!

Fantastic!

This was the first book by Madeleine L'Engle that I ever read and I fell in love with her writing and her characters. I was ecstatic to find out that she had written more books about the same characters and I now own nearly every work of fiction she's ever written. I love this book so much because I discovered it at that time of life when you bumble through adolescence and you aren't really sure who you are and where you're going yet. You also aren't exactly sure anymore where you stand with people. Reading this story of Polly helped me to realise the same thing she does through the course of the novel: Friendship works both ways. Friends will always try their best to help each other and support each other. Friends do not sacrifice one another for personal gain. Friends love each other because of who they are. True friendship is forever and can cross time and space.