The final book in Old Favorites Week is by Madeleine L’Engle, and most readers would expect this to be a review of A Wrinkle in Time. As much as I loved that book, though, A Ring of Endless Light is the book that had more of an impact on me. I originally wrote this review when Ms. L’Engle died (September of 2007), and here it is, again, for your reading pleasure.

Technically this is the third book in the Austin family series (of which there are four, with a tangentially related fifth book), but I believe it can be read on its own. Vicky Austin is fifteen the summer that her grandfather is dying from cancer, and the whole family goes to stay with him on the island where he lives. Her older brother, John, has a summer job on the other side of the island, working with dolphins. One of his coworkers is a young man named Adam Eddington, also an aspiring marine biologist. An old acquaintance of Vicky’s (from the previous book, The Moon by Night), Zachary Gray, also makes an appearance.

The plot isn’t very action-packed, but the philosophical and thematic underpinnings of the book, as well as its writing style, are what packs a wallop. Vicky and her family are going through a mourning process for the entire book, and the three young men in her life (the island has very few people on it) each demonstrate a different kind of mourning.

Zachary has recently lost his father, but his father had his body stored cryogenically, just in case it becomes possible to resurrect them later. So Zachary’s dealing with the loss of his father by pretending it hasn’t happened; as if his father has just left for a while and will be back. Ultimately this doesn’t work at all; we even know at the beginning that it doesn’t work. These emotions just fuel Zachary’s self-destructive impulses, resulting in the loss of someone else’s life.

That someone else was Captain Rodney, whose son, Leo, is the second of the males important to Vicky that summer. Leo has always lived on the island, and has a very close-to-nature and close-to-each-other kind of family. He’s younger than the other two, and therefore hides less and represses very little. His mourning is earthy, out there, physical, and complete, and his healing fairly rapid.

Adam has losses in his past, as readers would know if they’d read The Arm of the Starfish. He discusses them with Vicky, in his quiet, academic way, and mourns in a quiet, academic, un-showy way. He does have feelings and they cannot be overlooked, but ultimately, this internalized mourning is a lot more attractive to Vicky than Leo’s explosions or Zachary’s repression. She must, of course, still find her own course with dealing with the loss of her grandfather, and she does, to some extent.

In addition to a story of loss, there’s a coming-of-age element. She has more responsibilities due to her parents’ preoccupation, and is also left alone more to think. The young men also treat her in different fashions: Leo, like a romantic peer; Zachary, as an equal but with more obvious sexual designs on her; and Adam, alternately as an equal and as a child. It’s Adam’s treating her as a child that drives her crazy, since he’s the one in which she has a true romantic interest. But how, exactly, will that work?

The dolphins, with which both John and Adam are working, play an important role. The scientist under whom they are working is researching dolphin communication, which includes both their frying-pan noises and the non-verbal styles. How does this communication relate to human communication? How like humans are dolphins? Do dolphins mourn?

L’Engle’s writing style is luminous and poetic; this book, unlike the more famous A Wrinkle in Time, is mostly realistic fiction, but it holds the same sense of wonder and mystery. While L’Engle herself is Episcopalian, and Vicky’s grandfather an Episcopalian minister, her view of Christianity is a very loving, forgiving, and spiritual one. She doesn’t force it on the reader, but lets the ideas unfold through the words of saints and poets, as well as the grandfather, a saint-like figure, himself.

All in all, this is an amazing, beautiful, haunting book. I searched for years to find the right copy of it – mine is one of the older hardbacks. I don’t think it’ll surprise anyone that I’ve given it 5/5 stars.