L'Engle's irksomely superior Murry family reassembles here for Thanksgiving dinner, about ten years after Meg and Charles Wallace braved the Wrinkle in Time to rescue their scientist father from malevolent cosmic forces. Now Mother has her Nobel prize; the mundane twins are in law and med schools, respectively; Meg is married to old friend Calvin O'Keefe and happily pregnant (but more bland and vacuous than she ever was before); Father is a confidant of the President, who calls him now simply to unload his worry about the imminent nuclear war threats of South American dictator Mad Dog Branzillo; and precocious Charles Wallace, now 15, leaves his tesseract model and goes off to his star-watching rock to see what he can do to avert disaster. There, with the wind making the decisions and the evil echthroi trying to catch him en route, Charles rides a unicorn back in time and goes "Within" a series of individual consciousnesses. Through these psychic stopovers L'Engle tells of two Welsh brothers who came here before Columbus and fought over an Indian maid, and of their descendants from Puritan times straight on down to Mrs. O'Keefe—now Meg's bitter, inarticulate mother-in-law, who has roused herself just long enough to provide Charles with a rune and charge him with the mission. The idea, according to the unicorn, is for Charles to influence a Might-Have-Been which determines whether Branzillo is descended from the good or the bad line, and thus (?!) whether he will or will not start a nuclear war—a shaky if not asinine premise on which to build an earth-tilting adventure. The Madoc-Maddok-Maddox-Mad Dog family saga grows in interest as Charles gradually figures out all the connections, but—though his mission succeeds somewhere in the 19th century—we never see him as anything but a passive, if uniquely present, onlooker. Meg's role is even more passive and less engaging, as she alternates between wringing her hands in the family kitchen and stroking a strange dog on her attic bed while fretfully following Charles Wallace's adventures in her "kything" mind.
Pub Date: July 1, 1978
ISBN: 0374373620
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1978
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A thrilling story that’s full of darkness and light.
Now that Ren’s and Sunho’s true identities have been exposed, Ren must find a way to bring Sunho home while assuming a role she never wanted.
Ren is no longer a traveling troupe performer. After her Light powers were revealed and she defeated the general who killed her mother, she had to take her rightful place as the Princess of Sareniya and a celestial maiden. Before she can claim the throne, however, Ren needs to find Sunho, the boy she loves. After recovering a memory that revealed the horrific truth about what happened to him and his brother, Sunho succumbed to the pain and rage, fully transforming into the Demon. Working with her new friends and allies, Ren travels far afield, trying everything to bring Sunho back—not only to Sareniya but to his human self. As Ren delves deeper into the politics of the royal court, she discovers that there’s more to the war with Volmar, the demon experiments, her magic, her ancestors, and the world she knew as a child. She’ll have to summon her courage and wit while learning to embrace her true self in order to rid their world of darkness. This is an exciting, action-packed, and fast-paced duology closer, filled with plot twists and a touch of romance. Detailed worldbuilding provides additional context for the East Asian–influenced setting, and the well-developed characters explore a wide range of emotions and internal struggles.
A thrilling story that’s full of darkness and light. (map) (Fantasy. 13-18)Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781250853110
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A rare second volume that surpasses the first, with, happily, more intrigue and passion still to come.
A heady blend of courtly double-crossing, Faerie lore, and toxic attraction swirls together in the sequel to The Cruel Prince (2018).
Five months after engineering a coup, human teen Jude is starting to feel the strain of secretly controlling King Cardan and running his Faerie kingdom. Jude’s self-loathing and anger at the traumatic events of her childhood (her Faerie “dad” killed her parents, and Faerie is not a particularly easy place even for the best-adjusted human) drive her ambition, which is tempered by her desire to make the world she loves and hates a little fairer. Much of the story revolves around plotting (the Queen of the Undersea wants the throne; Jude’s Faerie father wants power; Jude’s twin, Taryn, wants her Faerie betrothed by her side), but the underlying tension—sexual and political—between Jude and Cardan also takes some unexpected twists. Black’s writing is both contemporary and classic; her world is, at this point, intensely well-realized, so that some plot twists seem almost inevitable. Faerie is a strange place where immortal, multihued, multiformed denizens can’t lie but can twist everything; Jude—who can lie—is an outlier, and her first-person, present-tense narration reveals more than she would choose. With curly dark brown hair, Jude and Taryn are never identified by race in human terms.
A rare second volume that surpasses the first, with, happily, more intrigue and passion still to come. (map) (Fantasy. 14-adult)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-31035-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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