At the beginning of the year, I decided to immerse myself in the life and works of a single author. And what better author to choose than perhaps my favorite author, Madeline L’Engle? I found the perfect place to start with, this biography written by her granddaughters, Voiklis and Roy.

I so enjoyed the many photographs, poems, letters, journal entries they had access to and shared with L’Engle’s readers. Although L’Engle had a lonely childhood, constantly faced financial insecurity and received a great many rejections of her books and plays, she always knew she was meant to be a writer. To me, she was an inspiring writer whose intelligence and compassion shone through her books, and reading this book, I was able to appreciate her as the elegant, creative woman she was to her granddaughters. In the introduction, they stated that they “wanted to write about her in a way that would bring her to life, for her readers,” and that is exactly what they did.

Some of the most interesting parts were about L’Engle as a young woman, who first attended boarding school, then went on to a girls’ college. L’Engle’s relationship with her mother was also an interesting facet of the biography. The biography ends with the publication of A Wrinkle in Time. The granddaughters explained that after all, L’Engle wrote her own autobiography, Circle of Quiet (which I believe I read years ago, but I plan to read it again). The authors have managed to create a true picture of a very real person in Madeline.

I would assign it a 5 out of 5 on a “readability scale.”

This delightful book is actually a series of sequential, connected poems. It is historical fiction at its best. Each poem continues the narrative of Ha Ma, roughly translated as “River Horse.” It begins in Part One with her life in Saigon, Viet Nam, on Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, 1975. The I Ching Teller of Fate predicts that her family’s “lives will twist inside out,” and indeed they do. Her father is MIA and they wait for him to return, while every-day life grows harder and harder.

The Communists, who abducted Ha’s father eventually take over Saigon, and the family flees, ending up on a small boat headed for Guam. It is the story of many refugees fleeing the war, and one that eventually lands them in Alabama, where she is ridiculed and bullied for being “different.”

Mind you, all this happens in a series of poems, a truly masterful accomplishment on the author’s part. The poetry is simple, often exuding an Asian “tone” or “flavor.” It was a delight to read and delivered an engaging story.