L is for L’Engle #AtoZChallenge

I fell in love with Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time when I was a kid. Up until then I read mostly historical fiction (Thank you, American Girls books . . .) and Nancy Drew. The idea of interplanetary travel was new and I didn’t so much read as inhaled the series.

I didn’t pick up L’Engle’s work again until my senior year in high school, when I read Walking on Water on a sweaty stank-tomb of a bus on my way back from Mexico.

You know when you sink into a hot tub on a frigid winter night? At first your entire body screams H*** NO!! But then the pain subsides and your muscles relax like ice cream melting on hot concrete during a Californian 4^th of July. It’s a giant hug from the tub.

That’s what reading Walking on Water was like. A giant ice-cream hug from Madeleine L’Engle.

This was the first time I encountered anybody who thought the same way I did, who not only thought dreams of angels and unicorns and slowing down the busyness of life is healthy for any artist but encouraged it. Every page was a validation of my soul.

Since then, I have fallen in love with her nonfiction in a Desdmond-Dickens way. I still have a couple unread books of hers on my shelf, but I don’t want to read them because it means I have no more L’Engle books to discover.

Because every single nonfiction book is another flavor of ice cream.

Who is your favorite author?

(If you’re a L’Engle fan, here are some words that may cause a heart attack in you as they did in me: there is a FIFTH BOOK in the Time series! IT’S A QUINTENT!!!

You’re welcome.)