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The Moon by Night: Book Two of the Austin Family Chronicles - Softcover

Buch 2 von 5: Austin Family Series

L'Engle, Madeleine

 
9780312379322: The Moon by Night: Book Two of the Austin Family Chronicles
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0312379323 ISBN 13: 9780312379322
Verlag: Square Fish, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Book two of the Austin Family Chronicles, an award-winning young adult series from Madeleine L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, about a girl who experiences the difficulties and joys of growing up.

“Everyone who remembers Meet the Austins as a delightful family story will want to read . . . this wise, beautifully written novel.” —Chicago Tribune

As if simply being fourteen-years-old weren't bad enough—what with the usual teenage angst and uncertainty, Vicky Austin's always comforting and reliable home life is changing completely. Her brother John is going off to college in the fall. Maggy, an orphan taken in by the Austins two years ago, has gone to live with her legal guardian. And the rest of Vicky's family is moving from their quiet house in the country to the heart of New York City.

But before the big move, the entire Austin family is taking a meandering trip across the country in their station wagon, stopping to camp along the way, with no set schedule and not a single night of camping experience among them.

Wild animal attacks. Life-threatening natural disasters. Cute boys on the prowl. Anything can happen in the great outdoors.

Praise for The Moon by Night:

“Idealistic and wise, this is also absorbing reading and very much a story of today.” —The Horn Book Magazine

“Everyone who remembers Meet the Austins as a delightful family story will want to read its successor. . . . Vicky, groping painfully for answers, finding help from many sources, will strike chords of sympathy and understanding in her contemporaries, who are certain to find comfort and satisfaction in this wise, beautifully written novel.” —Chicago Tribune

“The Austin family spends the summer on a cross-country camping trip . . . Vicky, now ‘almost 15,' tells the story, and the reader feels a strong personal identification with the thoughts and emotions of this age group through her story.” —School Library Journal

“With natural dialogue and good characterization, this story of an intelligent, lifelike family is far superior to the average fare for the early teens.” —Booklist

Books by Madeleine L'Engle

A Wrinkle in Time Quintet
A Wrinkle in Time
A Wind in the Door
A Swiftly Tilting Planet
Many Waters
An Acceptable Time

A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel by Madeleine L'Engle; adapted & illustrated by Hope Larson

Intergalactic P.S. 3 by Madeleine L'Engle; illustrated by Hope Larson: A standalone story set in the world of A Wrinkle in Time.

The Austin Family Chronicles
Meet the Austins (Volume 1)
The Moon by Night (Volume 2)
The Young Unicorns (Volume 3)
A Ring of Endless Light (Volume 4) A Newbery Honor book!
Troubling a Star (Volume 5)

The Polly O'Keefe books
The Arm of the Starfish
Dragons in the Waters
A House Like a Lotus

And Both Were Young

Camilla

The Joys of Love

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007) was the Newbery Medal-winning author of more than 60 books, including the much-loved A Wrinkle in Time. Born in 1918, L'Engle grew up in New York City, Switzerland, South Carolina and Massachusetts. Her father was a reporter and her mother had studied to be a pianist, and their house was always full of musicians and theater people. L'Engle graduated cum laude from Smith College, then returned to New York to work in the theater. While touring with a play, she wrote her first book, The Small Rain, originally published in 1945. She met her future husband, Hugh Franklin, when they both appeared in The Cherry Orchard.

Upon becoming Mrs. Franklin, L'Engle gave up the stage in favor of the typewriter. In the years her three children were growing up, she wrote four more novels. Hugh Franklin temporarily retired from the theater, and the family moved to western Connecticut and for ten years ran a general store. Her book Meet the Austins, an American Library Association Notable Children's Book of 1960, was based on this experience.

Her science fantasy classic A Wrinkle in Time was awarded the 1963 Newbery Medal. Two companion novels, A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet (a Newbery Honor book), complete what has come to be known as The Time Trilogy, a series that continues to grow in popularity with a new generation of readers. Her 1980 book A Ring of Endless Light won the Newbery Honor. L'Engle passed away in 2007 in Litchfield, Connecticut.

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The Moon by Night

The Austin Family Chronicles, Book 2By Madeleine L'Engle

Square Fish

Copyright © 2008 Madeleine L'Engle
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312379322
One
 
 
“Vicky!”
It was John’s voice and he was calling for me. I suppose somewhere on the inside of my mind I realized it, but with the outside of my mind all I heard was the constant crying of sea gulls and the incoming boom of breakers. I hadn’t even seen that the early morning sun had moved across the sky, and the tide had pushed the waves closer up to my feet. I’d forgotten that there was any such thing as time, and almost why I’d come sliding down the steep path to the cove and climbed up on the sunbaked rock.
I wanted to be alone and I wanted to think. Indoors there was excitement and confusion and I guess a lot of happiness. I was the only one who seemed to be unhappy because nothing would ever be the same again. Up to a few days ago my life (and fifteen years is quite a considerable hunk of time—well, I’m not quite fifteen, but I’m on the way) had been all of a piece, exciting, sometimes, and even miserable, but always following the same and simple pattern of home and school and family. And now it was all being thrown away, tossed to the four winds. I wanted to leave all the chatter and babble and be alone to sort things out. Just a few minutes alone down at the beach—was that so very much to ask?
“Vicky! VICK-EEEE!”
Now even the outside of my mind couldn’t confuse John’s angry shouting with a sea gull’s squawk. I looked up. He was scrambling down the path, but much more slowly than usual, because he was dressed in grey flannel slacks and a freshly ironed white shirt and was carrying his jacket over his arm. I waved at him.
He sounded furious. “Vicky! Victoria Austin! Get up here! Don’t you know what time it is?”
Of course I didn’t know what time it was. I’d left my watch with my clothes when I put on my bathing suit. I wouldn’t dare use that as an excuse with John, though. He knows perfectly well that I can tell by the sun, that I can tell by the tide. What he wouldn’t know was that I had been lost in time, and that my few minutes had stretched out to what was obviously over an hour and I hadn’t even realized it.
I jumped off the rock onto the soft sand instead of climbing down. We’ve always jumped off the rock, so maybe what I was doing at that moment was hanging on to my childhood instead of trying to leap out of it the way I usually do. I hurried across the sand and started up the almost vertical path that leads to the top of the bluff. There’s a winding road you can take, full of hairpin bends, but we’ve always taken the path cut down through the scrubby bushes. The bushes were very useful in helping me to pull myself up the path quickly, and in keeping me from looking at my rightfully enraged older brother. He had climbed back up to the top of the bluff and was standing there waiting for me. When he spoke his voice was coldly angry. “Have you no sense at all? We’ve been looking for you for the last half hour. With everything there is to do why do you have to pick this particular day to go mooning off by yourself?”
I didn’t answer. He was right and I was wrong and there wasn’t any point in shouting in the face of that calm fury. I stared down at my bare feet as I hurried along the dusty road.
A hundred yards down the road was my grandfather’s house, if you can call it a house. It’s an old stable painted a lovely barn red. The horse stalls are still there but now they’re all filled with shelves of books, so it’s more like a library that somebody lives in than a house. There’s one bedroom with Grandfather’s huge four-poster bed, and up above the stalls is a loft with six army cots.
I ran ahead of John, into the stable, hoping I could rush through and up the ladder to the loft without seeing anybody. But of course the first person I saw was my father. I practically knocked him down in my hurry.
He grabbed me by both elbows. “Vicky, your mother has needed every bit of help she could get this morning and you simply went off without a word to anyone. Now get up to the loft and get changed and please do not keep us waiting.”
John tries to copy Daddy when he’s angry. He couldn’t have a better model. I mumbled, “I’m sorry, Daddy,” and scurried up the ladder. It seemed odd not to have to climb over the recumbent body of our Great Dane, Mr. Rochester, who usually spent most of the time when we were at Grandfather’s lying at the foot of the ladder and being miserable because he couldn’t climb it. But that was part of it all, part of the reason I’d wanted to go down to the beach to look at the ocean and rest my eyes where the ocean and the sky became one. This time Mr. Rochester wasn’t with us.
Up in the loft Suzy and Maggy were standing in front of the mirror, preening. Suzy’s my younger sister, and Maggy’s just a year older and has lived with us for the past couple of years, but won’t after today. Another reason.
Suzy and Maggy are just about the same size and Suzy is a buttercup-colored blonde, and Maggy’s hair is blue-black. Up until this winter people used to look at me pityingly when I was with the two of them. But Uncle Douglas always said I was an ugly duckling type, and suddenly with my fourteenth birthday all my angles and sticky-out bones and unmanageable hair seemed to come to some sort of agreement and I no longer felt wistful if I happened to look into a mirror when Suzy and Maggy were around. As a matter of fact, I enjoyed mirrors very much.
“Well, jeepers, Vicky!” Suzy accused as my head appeared in the loft. “Where have you been?”
I thought for a moment about not climbing the rest of the way up, but there wasn’t any place else to go. I decided maybe a change of subject would be nice, so I said, “You look gorgeous. Both of you.”
It worked. They started looking in the mirror again. Too old to be flower girls, too young to be bridesmaids, they stood dressed, Suzy in pale blue, Maggy in the softest rose, Aunt Elena’s hand-maidens, as Uncle Douglas called them. My dress was a very light, clear yellow, and I loved it, though it wasn’t nearly as dressed-up a dress as Suzy’s or Maggy’s, and I wasn’t going to be a handmaiden. I was just going to sit in the pew with Mother, and Rob, my little brother. John was best man, Daddy was going to give Aunt Elena away, and Grandfather, of course, was going to perform the ceremony. It was a very family wedding.
Uncle Douglas is Daddy’s younger brother, and Aunt Elena has been mother’s best friend since they were at boarding school in Switzerland together. Hal, Aunt Elena’s first husband, a test pi lot, was killed several years ago, and we’d all been hoping for a long time that Uncle Douglas and Aunt Elena would get married. So why wasn’t I glowing like Suzy and Maggy?
If everything else could have been the same, if we could have gone back to Thornhill after the wedding, if everything could have gone on as usual, I would have lit up the beach with joy. But nothing was ever going to be the same again. Before we left for...

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Verlag
Square Fish
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0312379323
ISBN 13 
9780312379322
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
288
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Verantwortliche Person
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