In 1910 the newly-wed British wife of an American away on secret intelligence work is sent to his family home in South Carolina. While there she reads her husband's recently deceased grandmother's journals written before, during, and after the American Civil War/the War Between the States in an attempt to grapple with the family's history and understand the familial and racial tensions she has to navigate.

Beyond the fact that I wanted to read one of L'Engle's works for adults I have no idea how this ended up on my TBR list and going in I wasn't at all sure what it was about. At one point, Stella mentions her husband showed her a family tree before he left, and I found myself quite often wishing this had been included in the book as I tried to keep straight in my mind all the different characters and who was what relation to who.

Having said that, I found it fascinating both as a story and as a picture of a time and place I knew very little about. ( )

I only read a short part before deciding that I would go rapidly nuts around these people. I have a real problem with books when the author and I don't feel the same about the characters.

Stella, the central character, marries a man from an old southern family who promptly disappears on some important mission leaving her to go to "his old family home." I don't know if he ever reappears. Nothing like being dropped among a family of in-laws you've never met without any support from your spouse.

I'd get a dog both as an alternative to these people and an excuse to leave the house. The narrator's predecessor, whose diary she finds, is rather treacly when she is supposed to be noble. The "charmingly eccentric" aunts would drive me to a lot long walks with their repetitive conversations. Their literary games might be entertaining, but not when they are so occupied by them and their constant bickering hardly gives anyone else a chance to talk.

One of them does tell Stella about how they ran the antebellum plantation as a commune with equality between blacks and whites, and it was a paradise. Yet there is a black woman working for them who seems to do everything, and they all treat her like a semi-invisible servant when in fact it's her family's house! The family originally moved in with her ancestress to protect her from losing the house, and because they lost their own house in the Civil War, but they seem to have entirely forgotten these details. When one of the relatives tells the black woman to do something, and she says she's busy, he gets a bit threatening at her "defiance." And none of the more "enlightened" relatives stick up for her! Even if the situation doesn't make it safe for her to present herself as mistress of the house, her treatment by the other characters is sickening.

I was too angry to read any more.

A classic Southern Gothic story brimming with racial tension and family intrigue. It has the same good vs evil theme that worked so well in A Wrinkle in Time but here it falls flat. This may have been innovative and bold back in the ‘70s when it was written but, to me, reading it today, it comes across as a tired melodrama that reinforces the bigotry it tries to condemn. I expected better. ( )

South after war / Klan / Black Riders mixed births — Reneir curse + love — good

L'Engle at her best, this novel features Stella, who marries into the aristocratic Renier family and discovers a frightening world of intrigue, greed, prejudice, and superstition. Soon drawn into a raging battle between good and evil, Stella must fight her way through to find the other side of the sun.

I love the aunts in this book, and the literary games they play. I wonder how much of my literary character, if you will, was formed by early and frequent exposure to L'Engle. Though if that were true, I'd probably be a Christian as well, or at the very least a theist.

This is a strange book, dark and full of allusions, mysterious and circular and disorienting. Like the protagonist, Stella, one is plunged into a complex and layered Southern family with a generous helping of racial tension and conflict. On balance though, this, like all the other L'Engle books, is about the redemptive power of love. This one's darker than most, and the shocking denouement is precisely that- shocking no matter how many times one reads it.

One central quote never fails to make me weep.

"Only on love's terrible other side is found the place where lion and lamb abide.” ( )