Book Review: The Summer of the Great-Grandmother by Madeleine L'Engle

The Summer of the Great-Grandmother (The Crosswicks Journal - Book 2). Madeleine L'Engle. Harper & Row (1974). 245 pages. Genre:  Non-fiction, Memoir.

First Line: "This is the summer of the great-grandmother, more her summer than any other summer. This is the summer after her ninetieth birthday, the summer of the swift descent."

Summary:  Madeleine L'Engle tells about the summer she noticed drastic changes in her mother due to senility.  

My thoughts:  The author's mother always spends the summer with her family at Crosswicks, the country home owned by Madeleine and her husband Hugh.  She spends her winters in warmth of Florida.  It has been four summers since the Great-Grandmother earned her title.  She loves being a Great-Grandmother and enjoys spending time with her grandchildren.  However, this summer she is not herself.  She is fearful and hesitant.  She has difficulty carrying on a conversation, let alone enjoying time with her family.  It seems to have happened suddenly, but looking back, Madeleine can see that changes began to happen a couple of years ago after a major surgery.  

The author describes the things she is seeing in her mother as well as her thoughts and feelings about them.  The book is divided into four sections.  The first section, Summer's Beginning, tells what Madeleine is seeing and feeling.  The next two sections, The Mother I Knew and The Mother I Did Not Know, tell about her mother's past.  The final section, The Summer's End, comes back to the present.  When I first read the description of this book, I thought it would be terribly sad.  While there is some sadness, there is also quite a bit of beauty and joy.  The reader is immersed in the family life of the author with all of its ups and downs.  There are long walks, family dinners and weddings.  This is what I love most about The Crosswicks Journals - the immersion into the daily details of the author's life. 

I highly recommend this book and the first book in the Crosswicks Journals - A Circle of Quiet.  You could read this one as a stand alone, but reading the first book will give you a glimpse into the author's years as a newlywed and young mother.  

Quotes:

"The times I have been most fully me are when I have been wholly involved in someone or something else; when I am listening, rather than talking; cooking a special, festive dinner; struggling with a fugue at the piano; putting a baby to bed; writing."

"School was mostly something to be endured; I don't think I learned nearly as much from my formal education as from the books I read instead of doing homework, the daydreams which took me on exciting adventures in which I was intrepid and fearless, and graceful, the stories Mother told me, and the stories I wrote."

"I have her battered Bible, which Mother had rebound for me. It was much read, much marked, and there are stains which came, I think, through private tears.  Perhaps through it she will teach me an alphabet of grace."

"I have occasional binges of reading English murder mysteries or science fiction, not so much as an escape but as a reminder that there is still honor and fidelity in the world, despite murder and crime; and that the sky above me is full of billions of solar systems and island galaxies, and that nobody has yet been able to put the creation of a galaxy into the language of provable fact."