Reviews for A Swiftly Tilting Planet

The average rating for A Swiftly Tilting Planet based on 2 reviews is 1.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-02-15 00:00:00 Ashkan Rahimi This is where this series entirely fell off the rails for me. (If you enjoyed this book, feel free to skip my rant! You are totally entitled to your own opinions!) I expected to enjoy this! It is a dear favorite of several of my friends. But no. I did not enjoy it. I loathed this book. Loathed. Let us begin with the intro! The gang is assembled again! Dad is advising the president! Mom is science-ing! Sandy is in medical school! Denys is in law school! Charles Wallace is doing a lot better in school and having exciting intellectual pursuits outside school! Calvin is presenting an important paper in England! Meg is pregnant. Seriously. This is the only thing we hear about her. I really appreciated, in the earlier books, that Meg is an intellectual equal in her family. She likes math! She's stubborn and has a tempter but she saves the day with her multiplication tables! In this book, the only mentions of what she is doing are that she is a) married to Calvin, and b) pregnant. AAAAAAAGH. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH. Then, we get in to predestination bullshit, wherein we first learn that the native population of presumed!America was perfect and peaceful and wise-like-yoda before the white man came and spoiled all that. Thankfully we had TWO white dudes, and they have helpfully color coded eyes, so we can tell who is good and who is bad for the rest of the book. (Blue is good, guys!) Also, for all the bizarre fantasy native population in the first bit, as soon as the white guys arrive, we move right back to white only characters for the rest of the book. (White characters who have a hint of exotic ancestry!) The plot hinges on which white guy is the ancestor of a crazy Latin American dictator- if it's the blue eyed guy, we're cool! If it's the brown eyed guy, nuclear holocaust! Events must be manipulated to ensure the correct lineage, so there is some time travel, some jumping thru space, a unicorn, etc. Charles Wallace lives in the heads of generations of men who: write some books, see some visions, fall down some stairs, go to Patagonia. Alongside these generations of men, there are some women! The women are pregnant. (Some see visions AND are pregnant! Some are stupid and pregnant! Some care for infirm male relatives AND are pregnant! Some marry abusive dudes and GET pregnant!) No female character is not explicitly a mother/pregnant as a plot point. (Mmm. Maybe Zillah- maybe she was only explicitly a fiancee/longed for, and her fertility didn't enter into it.) Ugh. Also: we once again have a book where the fate of all of humanity rests on a single family tree. Good things about the book: The idea of kything is pretty cool.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-11-24 00:00:00 William Hebden Though L'Engle's storytelling improves after the dull previous outing of "A Wind in the Door", "Swiftly" fails in other more serious ways. The biggest problem is her somewhat silly reliance on hereditary family names from generation to generation--names that endure for hundreds of years and somehow continue to intersect. Madoc, Madog, Maddux, and Mad Dog; Gwydder, Gedder, and Gwen; Zyllie, Zyllah, Zylle; two Branwens and a Charles and a Chuck round out the cast. I think. Something like four different generations are followed and each generation has its own version of each namesake. But it's not just one namesake per generation--the 1865 generation has a Zyllie in America and a Zyllah in South America. Or is it the other way around? Gedder wants a Maddux to get with his sister Zyllah and wants Gwen for himself, but that Maddux is engaged to the Zyllie in America. Confusing? Yes. Does this sound silly? Yes. The first generation's usages of the names is fine. The second generation is interesting but gets a little confusing (like if the families married in the first generation, why are Maddocs still courting Zyllahs?). And by the third generation it's just absolutely ridiculous that L'Engle is still trying to play this name game. All this nuttiness aside, our hero, Charles Wallace doesn't seem to really do much in the story. He travels within a particular person in each generation and kind of becomes them. But only in the first generation is it clear that Charles himself steps forward and directs his host to act in a certain way. After that, Charles' influence on his host--and therefore on the novel--is less distinct. One can infer a few instances where his presence may have made a difference, but overall the effect is to make him seem more like a passive observer than active participant in saving civilization. And passivity is a serious flaw in any story.