Embarrassingly bad. Like L'Engle does Judy Blume or something. Maybe an after-school special. Back and forth between stories, neither of which is particularly compelling. I had thought we had seen the last of that idiot Zachary Gray, but he's back, as if nothing had happened. This book is eminently skippable, alas.

At 16, Polyhymnia O'Keefe has seen more different countries and had more different experiences than many people twice her age. and now she's about to see yet another country: Greece.

The O'Keefes now live on Benne Seed Island, South Carolina. Their neighbors are Maximiliana Horne and her companion Ursula Heschel. Max, as she likes to be called, took a liking to young Polly (who now spells her name with 2 Ls) and does all she can to augment the girl's education. Max arranges for Polly to work as a gofer at a conference on the island of Cyprus with her favorite author Virgina Porcher.

Polly was to meet her Uncle Sandy and Aunt Rhea in Athens, but their unexpected delay gives Polly three days alone in Athens to contemplate recent events, including what she sees as a major betrayal by Max, her friendship back home with one Queron "Renny" Renier (distant cousin of her friend Simon Renier) and the unexpected attentions of a wealthy young man named Zachary Gray.

Polly learns a lot from Zachary and from meeting the delegates of the conference, but can she find her way to forgiveness? Can she figure out who she is becoming through her friendships and her Greek experiences?

I enjoyed Polly's journey- I have since first encountering her as a 12-year-old in The Arm Of The Starfish. She is every bit her mother's child, yet she has qualities that Meg Murry O'Keefe never exhibited in the books featuring her.

Excellent. A combination of A Ring of Endless Light and the books in the Time Quintet. I much prefer L'Engle writing in the first person. Her prose is richer and more evocative. I like Polly and her view of the world. She is like her mother, Meg, like Vicky Austin, yet she is unlike both of them.
Some of the experiences that L'Engle conveys in this book were unexpected for the time, the language and topics covered. However, this is one of her later works, and she clearly developed with the changing times.
As always, my favorite things about the book are L'Engle's language, her amazing penchant for word choice and description, and the way she portrays love and human relationships, the diversity and acceptance and the compassion that make life in this crazy world worthwhile. We might go through bad things and hurt each other and lose trust in some people, but there will always be others to help us heal, to bring us out of the pain, and allow us to live again. That's the greatest message that this book sends.

This is one of my all-time favorite L'Engle books.

As protagonists go, I love Poly/Polly O'Keefe more than any of the other L'Engle main characters except Meg. Even if Polly keeps going out with Zachary Gray (duh!).

I love the settings of this book: one of the islands of the Carolinas, a beautiful place, and Greece, one of the places I long to go.

And I love Max. Maxamiliana Horne. Who is special and real and fascinating and loving and helped me start, when I was a mildly angry young person, to accept a close family member who is a Lesbian.

From the perspective of now, when the Gay and Lesbian community is prominent and things like Prop 8 raise a hue and cry of dismay, it seems weird that anyone might ever have had such feelings, but I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, when we did not talk of these things, and having someone in my family who was gay--but not openly so, because we did not talk of these things--was very difficult.

And then Madeleine, whom I trusted and loved through her books, said to me through the character of Max that it's okay to love someone who loves differently... and I began slowly to accept. This book brought healing to me in a way that no human being did as I was struggling to understand.