THE YOUNG UNICORNS

This is the third of Madeleine L’Engle’s Austin family books, and the first one I’ve really liked—probably because it has the good-versus-evil structure of the Time Quartet, whereas the first two volumes in the series were more standard coming-of-age stuff. Like The Arm of the Starfish, my previous L’Engle read, this doesn’t have any magical elements (there are no unicorns, as I had to keep explaining to A when he poked fun at the title and accompanying trippy ’60s cover art [designed, like the original Arm of the Starfish cover, by Ellen Raskin of Westing Game fame, woot!]), but it leans toward sci-fi (the “sci,” in this case, being a cutting-edge medical laser that can alter people’s brains). Admittedly, as in so many L’Engle books, some of the goings-on are weird (a crazed bishop holding court with gang members and a genie in an abandoned subway station, for instance), and unfortunately, although the story is supposed to have a gritty, urban feel to it (it’s set in NYC), that’s sometimes undermined by incredibly dated details (the ostensibly scary gang has the wince-inducing name “Alphabats,” the ultra-modern laser is called the “Micro-Ray,” and “acid” and “pot” are always in quotation marks). However, the wackiness is both endearing and effectively creepy, the plot is creative and suspenseful, and the characters are unforgettable. I’d been skeptical through the first part of the book, reading with one eyebrow perpetually raised, but by the end I was caught up in the undeniably powerful story.

What I thought was most interesting is that the book deliberately comments upon—indeed, is centered around—precisely the peculiar naiveté that I’d found slightly off-putting in the previous books. Having spent two novels painstakingly building a portrait of this unusually close-knit and virtuous family. L’Engle then throws them into a radically different situation and explores how they react. Their innocence simultaneously puts them at risk and gives them strength, adding a whole new dimension of complexity to the series.