"The Joys of Love" by Madeleine L'Engle at AbsoluteWrite

Hi all:

I have a new review up at Absolute Write of an exciting new posthumous novel called The Joys of Love by the wonderful writer, Madeleine L'Engle.


Here's how my review begins:

What a joy it was to learn about The Joys of Love, a brand new posthumous novel by Madeleine L'Engle. As a lifelong reader of L'Engle's works, I was saddened to learn of her death in August 2007, because it meant the world had lost a sensitive and intelligent voice crying in the wilderness. So it's a real treat to be given this "new" story, which is also poignant at this time of L'Engle's death for being a somewhat autobiographical coming of age story.

Lead character Elizabeth Jerrold is a 20-year-old apprentice in a summer stock beach theater where she falls in love for the first time. L'Engle also spent time in the theater when she was very young and ended up marrying the actor Hugh Franklin. She wrote a lovely memoir about their long marriage together called Two-Part Invention.

The Joys of Love is presented here in a lovely hardcover package from L'Engle's longtime publisher, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, with an introduction and tribute from one But I digress.of L'Engle's granddaughters. This novel is a straightforward young adult story in the vein of L'Engle's A Small Rain or Camilla as opposed to her more famous and award-winning science fiction young adult stories, A Wrinkle in Time, and its sequels. It can also be classified as a historical because it evokes a simpler time in the summer of 1946 before television came to dominate the entertainment landscape, and theater or film were the social choices of an evening. It was also a time when the innocence of youth lasted longer in a less media-saturated world ...

Click here to read more about this joy of a novel.

Enjoy!

hrh