Spoilers ahead!

As I read this book, I came to think of it as "the pedophile book." 16 year old Polly is involved in several relationships that ultimately seem inappropriate. We'll start with the easy one:

1. Renny is a 20-something medical resident who dates Polly. He limits his intimacy with her to kissing, until she experiences a traumatic event. While she's still basically in shock, he seduces and sleeps with her.

2. Zachary is a 20-something rich, college kid bumming around Europe. He sees Polly at a cafe, and follows her back to her hotel. They explore Athens together, and it's clear that he wants much more than kissing. She rejects a sexual relationship with him, but he continues to "stalk" her, following her to a conference where she'll be working.

3. Ah, then there's Max: an older (40's?) lesbian who cultivates a relationship with Polly. She claims Polly is like a daughter, but there is something creepy about her. She gets drunk, and makes a pass at Polly, who runs and is traumatized.

All three of these relationships made me flinch. They were very uncomfortable, and all came across as predatory.

At the end of all of these cringe-worthy relationships, Polly calls Max and forgives her. After all, she's dying and was drunk. So it was ok for her to make a move on Polly.

This book is in the O'Keefe series, which is sort of a sequel series to the Wrinkle in Time books (Meg, from those books, is Polly's mother). What's depressing about that is that the original characters have been reduced to uninteresting, undeveloped, cameos. After the great things Meg and Calvin did, their final contribution to the world is to spit out a bunch of kids. Sandy and Dennys? The brothers who were supposed to be "Teachers?" Yeah. They're lawyers. But they're working to save the planet, so it's ok.

I'm not even sure of what the final message was supposed to be (if there was one). Forgiveness? OK, I can see that. But you'd want to also remove all of these people from your life. Polly just goes on accepting, and ultimately playing the victim.

L'Engle can still write: the book is compelling to read, and moves along easily (even when almost nothing is happening), but it's a sad, sad postscript to her Wrinkle in Time days.

Bent Book (presents good as bad and bad as good). I was terribly dissapointed and even angry when I finished this. I felt betrayed by the author. Near the end, the author introduces homosexuality and pre-marital sex and presents them as good.

This is not for the young adult audience. Description of homosexual relations as well loss of sexual innocence is contained within this story. I was saddened by their inclusion.

In my opinion hands down the best of either the O'Keefe Family or Austin Family series. Sixteen-year-old Pol(l)y is off to Greece to spend three weeks interning at an international humanitarian conference; in flashbacks, we learn that she's had a tough few months at home, particularly regarding a couple of new friends--a local (septa? octa?)generian artist and heiress, and her young medical intern cousin. I can certainly pick nits with it (ZACHARY F***'IN GRAY, OMBDFJKDS F*** THAT GUY FOREVER) (Is no one else creeped out by a MEDICAL INTERN'S more-than-just-friendly interest in a SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD??) but by and large, this story felt very rich and real and authentic in terms of the inner life of a sixteen-year-old girl who is starting to figure out some of the tougher & darker life lessons that adolescence brings, while still being sweet and hopeful and charming. Some brilliant feminist film director, make this book into a movie immediately, plzthnx.

I have absolutely zero idea what happened to this book (and/or the author) while it was being written. If you told me that L’Engle hadn’t actually written “A House Like A Lotus” I wouldn’t be surprised.
The entire tone of the book is different from all the others, the characters are utterly shallow, and the flashbacks are somewhat more interesting than the present!
So, what happens in “A House Like a Lotus”, the crashing sequel to “Dragons in the Waters” and “The Arm of the Starfish”? I’ll give it to you as I gave it to my younger sister of considerable good sense.

A girl named Polly goes to Greece and is picked up by this guy named Zachary. (And this is supposed to be okay?) Zachary is a terrible jerk, but is portrayed in a somewhat positive light. Meanwhile, before she went to Greece, she discovered that her aunt figure/family friend was lesbian. Did I mention that a tropical disease that couldn’t be cured was killing her?

Put that on top of the fact, she’s seeing a guy at least ten years older and that goes completely off the rails. Polly has very little sense and excepting some great quotes about homeschooling, this book can be summed up exactly how my sister summed it up—

“So, a tropical disease that can’t be cured is killing her lesbian aunt?”

Usually, I adore L'engle's books, but I struggled with this one. Perhaps it was the first person narrative style, perhaps it was the painfully flat, and honestly unlikeable character of Zachary, or the "tell rather than show" nature of Polly's relationship with Max that struck such an awkward chord...or maybe a combination of all of those things that make this episode in the life of Polly O'Keefe feel hollow at times. Usually, her novels feel like they are ageless, but this one was extremely YA, and not in a positive way. However, there are moments of truth & beauty between characters & lovely descriptions. I do not think this is not a book about lesbians, as others have claimed. I think it is a novel about the loss of innocence and the deep scars that we carry from experiences that happen to us when we are young. It's about coming out of those experiences changed and struggling through them to learn more about others and ourselves. I wouldn't put this book in the hands of a child younger than 16 or 18, and even then, I think there would be a lot to discuss and sort through together.

I will spare you all the angry rant and just say that I strongly disliked this book.

1 Star - Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Did not like and would never recommend. I’m glad it’s over.

Having read so much of her non-fiction, I decided to re-read some of L’Engle’s novels.

Really, I would not recommend this book for children or even teenagers, unless you’re ready to read it with them and discuss it. While it handles some issues very well I was frankly appalled by how casually a relationship between an older man (mid to late 20s) and a 16 year old girl was handled. For one thing that the character’s parents allowed her to go out with an adult man, for another that the “love” scene was portrayed as no big deal when it was actually predatory and exploitative, to say nothing of illegal. If my child was reading about it, I would want to be sure he or she understood that a situation like that would NOT be normal, healthy, legal, or moral. It seems out of character for L’Engle to have written it, and the book itself is not as well written as her other books. I really think you could, and probably should, just skip it entirely.

{Read my full review of some L'Engle non-fiction and two of her fiction series here}

Notable Content: Kissing. Ba***rd and b***h. Sexual content:  Very shortly described sex with no specific body parts mentioned except her nipples rising. A guy asks a girl if she's a virgin and if her parents have sex (she refuses to answer). He asks if she's wearing her "chastity belt" (she is). Someone repeats gossip that two women are lesbian and a girl goes over to their house to have sex, which prompts some discussion about lesbianism and sex gossip. Gay, f****t, qu**r. "Celibacy." "Genital imagery." "Sexpot." "Slept around." "Lust." "Dyke." "Erotic." A girl thinks about how a boy "exposed himself" and touched her hand with "it."

Note: I originally gave this about 2 stars (and said so in my Q1 wrap up on booktube), but after writing out this review, I couldn't give it anymore than 1. Just...no.

Alright, so y'all know I love Madeleine L'Engle. She wrote my all-time favorite book (A Wrinkle in Time) and I love pretty much the entire rest of the series as well (pretty indifferent about book 5), but this? This did not at all feel like a Madeleine L'Engle book, to the point that if I didn't know it was written by her, I never would've guessed that it was.

This is the third and final book in the O'Keefe Family series and, once again, we spend most of our time hanging out with Polly. Considering I've now read eight of Madeleine L'Engle's books and I super love the four that have to do with other characters and feel pretty 'meh' about or dislike the ones with Polly as our heroine, maybe I just don't like Polly as a character? IDK.

In comparison to the main characters in the Time Quintet, Polly feels quite underdeveloped. I felt this way last year when I read An Acceptable Time. In hindsight, one should probably read this trilogy before reading An Acceptable Time, but since all the novels are technically standalone stories, the development of the characters should be self-contained as well in the sense that you get more growth if you read all the books, but no one feels underdeveloped if you only read one.

This is the only book in the series (and the only of L'Engle's fiction books I've read so far) that is written in first person, which is just odd. It really doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me to write the first two books in third and the last in first, particularly because it then feels like a totally different writing style, which I was really not a big fan of. But beyond my issues with Polly's development and writing and such, my biggest issues were related to the events of the story itself.

The story starts with Polly going on a trip to Greece and then to Cyprus. You learn pretty quickly that this trip was arranged by her friend Max and also that Max betrayed her in some way and she hasn't found it in her heart to forgive her yet. As you progress through the story, you flip back and forth between what Polly is doing in the present and the development of her friendship with Max. As a result, it takes a pretty long time to finally figure out what the big betrayal was and when we finally got there? I couldn't help but wonder why it was such a big deal. Something specific would've had to be part of the big betrayal for Polly's anger and frustration to make sense, and it's in no way implied or explicitly stated that that thing happened. So it just felt off.

On top of that, in the development of her friendship with Max and during her present day time on Greece and Cyprus, we learn that Polly, who is 16-years-old, has relationships of some kind with multiple guys who are in their early or mid-20s. One of them is technically approved by her parents, but it still made me feel alllll kinds of squicky and uncomfortable. Particularly with Zachary, the guy in Greece, there's a lot of emotional manipulation that takes place which is never okay, but is especially uncomfortable to read about when there's already the displaced power dynamic of an adult male and a teenage female. The more I read about what happens between Polly and Zachary and Polly and the guy back home (blanking on his name right now), the more I kept thinking, "Did Madeleine L'Engle really write this?"

So basically, I'd skip this book. It really doesn't add anything to other L'Engle stories other than introduce the relationship between Polly and Zachary, which resurfaces in An Acceptable Time, but I also feel like you could just treat the Time Quintet as a quartet and skip book five, so yea...skip this one. Skip An Acceptable Time and you won't miss anything except poor character development and squicky relationships that make you question how a beloved author could write something like this.

Warning: Here be spoilers!

I read this when I was a teenager. I remember being enthralled and a little disturbed and confused. I was looking for something to read in the doctor's waiting room and decided to download this and read it.

As an adult reader I notice that all the major characters in the novel are all amazing overachievers, brilliant, all charming, all at the tops of their careers, all who give our main character their full and thoughtful attention, all with seemingly good intentions. If only we could all grow up in that world.

Polly O'Keefe is the daughter of Meg and Calvin (of A Wrinkle in Time). She flies to Athens as a gift from Max, whose calls she is dodging. Flashbacks of the past year fill us in on Renny, the internist who buys pizza for Polly and kisses her, and an implied trauama, while she explores Athens with a handsome young Zachary, whose father is implied to be evil and incredibly wealthy. When she leaves Athens to go to the conference she's been hired for as a gofer, she meets another handsome man who also flirts with her but to her horror eventually reveals that he is married.

Both messy and neat. I'm puzzled that Polly's parents aren't more cautious of their 16-year old daughter spending time with a man in his mid-20s, even though he's a perfectly lovely man who generally exhibits restraint.

Eventually we learn that Polly was the subject of what seems to be drunken pass by a much older friend of the family, someone she trusted deeply and who had treated her like a daughter. The traumatic event, when finally described, is still confusing - Max is drunk, says she needs "an affirmation of being," stands up, collapses, reaches for Polly and Polly flees. It's as if L'Engle can't bring herself to give this the detail it needs to explain Polly's response to it. Polly's response and context make it clear that this was an attempted sexual assault, but on paper Max just seems quite drunk and as far as we can tell is too incapacitated and weak to pose a true threat.

That said, it's understandable that Polly is traumatized. It's less understandable that the few adults in her life simply urge her to forgive and try to understand. In the end she does forgive, and calls the dying Max to say that she loves her, and it's a beautiful thing and I cried over it, but it's truly puzzling.

Despite my beefs with the book I still love it and already want to re-read it.

Big ideas/quotes:
"Love means you don't dominate or manipulate or control."
"In this body, in this town of Spirit, there is a little house shaped like a lotus, and in that house there is a little space. There is as much in that little space within the heart as there is in the whole world outside."

The author is fascinated by taking advantage of naive, vulnerable children and teens. This book is so moody. The story doesn't advance any more world building or even present anything other than Polly's coming to terms with impending death of a friend, and being really frightened (at nothing but her immature perception of reality and by her own inexperience with life) then assaulted in the space of 12 hours. Not a good addition to the series.