Madeleine L'engle
Description
Product Description
The Austins are trying to settle into their new life in New York City, but their once close-knit family is pulling away from eac
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h other. Their father spends long hours alone in his study working on the research project that brought the family to the city. John is away at college. Rob is making friends with people in the neighborhood: newspaper vendors, dog walkers, even the local rabbi. Suzy is blossoming into a vivacious young woman. And Vicky has become closer to Emily Gregory, a blind and brilliant young musician, than to her sister Suzy.
With the Austins going in different directions, they don’t notice that something sinister is going on in their neighborhood—and it’s centered around them. A mysterious genie appears before Rob and Emily. A stranger approaches Vicky in the park and calls her by name. Members of a local gang are following their father. The entire Austin family is in danger. If they don’t start telling each other what’s going on, someone just might get killed.
About the Author
Madeleine L’Engle (1918–2007) was born in New York City and attended Smith College. She wrote more than 60 books, the most famous of which is
A Wrinkle In Time (1962), winner of the Newbery Award in 1963. L’Engle continued the story of the Murry family from
A Wrinkle In Time with seven other novels (five of which are available as
A Wrinkle In Time Quintent from Square Fish). She also wrote the famous series featuring the Austin family, beginning with the novel
Meet The Austins (1960). L’Engle revisited the Austins four more times over the next three decades, concluding with
Troubling a Star in 1994. The story of the Austins had some autobiographical elements, mirroring Madeleine’s life and the life of her family. Madeleine L’Engle’s last book,
The Joys of Love, is a romantic, coming-of-age story she wrote back in the 1940s, and is being published by FSG.
Review
“A first-rate suspense story.” ―
The Washington Post Book World
From the Publisher
They had been standing around the lamp, looking at Emily holding it in her strong fingers, rubbing it. Certainly none of them, not even Rob, expected to hear a sepulchral voice behind them.
"You called me?"
They swung around...
From the Inside Flap
They had been standing around the lamp, looking at Emily holding it in her strong fingers, rubbing it. Certainly none of them, not even Rob, expected to hear a sepulchral voice behind them.
"You called me?"
They swung around...
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Young Unicorns
One
Winter came early to the city that year. Josiah Davidson, emerging from the subway, his arms loaded with schoolbooks, shivered against the dank November rain which blew icily against his face and sent a trickle down the back of his neck. He did not see three boys in black jackets who moved out of a sheltering doorway and stalked him.
Uncomfortable, unaware, he hurried along the street until he came to a run-down tenement. Here he let himself in through the rusty iron gate that led to the basement apartment.
The three boys went silently up the brownstone steps and took cover in the doorway, listening, waiting.
The one room was dark and cold and smelled of cabbage; Josiah Davidson dumped his books on the table, sniffed with displeasure, and left. He stood for a moment on the wet sidewalk, looked downhill towards Harlem, uphill towards the great Cathedral which dominated the area, its multicolored Octagon of stone and glass glowing brilliantly against the rain-filled sky.
The three boys in the doorway waited until Josiah Davidson started up the hill, then followed. He climbed quickly and it was not easy to keep his pace. They began to run as he pulled a key ring, heavy with keys, from his pocket and fitted one into the wrought-iron gate at the bottom of the Cathedral Close.
As he opened the gate he swung round and saw them.
"What's your
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