TROUBLING A STAR

In Madeleine L’Engle’s final Austin family book (which takes place during the school year directly following the momentous summer of A Ring of Endless Light but was published 14 years later), Vicky travels to Antarctica to visit Adam Eddington, who is working at a research station, and becomes embroiled in international intrigue. The setting is interesting and I especially like that L’Engle makes use of the fictional South American nation of Vespugia that she created for A Swiftly Tilting Planet, but overall I found it a bit dull. The story is mostly travelogue, without either the excitement of Arm of the Starfish or the coming-of-age introspection of The Moon by Night. The good-vs.-evil struggle feels low-stakes and tacked on, the conclusion unsatisfying, probably because Vicky has very little agency; she’s just on a tour, and the big climax is that she gets stranded on an iceberg by the bad guys and then…waits to be rescued by the good guys? I didn’t see much continuity between this Vicky and the passionate dreamer of A Ring of Endless Light, and it seemed especially weird that there was absolutely no reference whatsoever to recent discovery that she can communicate telepathically with dolphins. I’m just saying, if I discover I can talk to dolphins one summer, and I find myself on a boat in the Antarctic a few months later, I might try conversing with a seal or a whale or something, especially when in peril, but it doesn’t even cross Vicky’s mind. Devoid of that mystical wacky awesomeness, Troubling a Star feels flat.