Meet the Austins: Book One of the Austin Family Chronicles (Austin Family Chronicles, 1, Band 1) - Softcover

L'Engle, Madeleine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312379315 ISBN 13: 9780312379315

Verlag: Square Fish, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Book one 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.

“Beautifully written, with integrity and warmth, and young people are bound to identify with the characters, each a person in his own right, and to read absorbed from first page to last. Thoroughly recommended.” —Chicago Tribune

For a family with four kids, two dogs, assorted cats, and a constant stream of family and friends dropping by, life in the Austin family home has always been remarkably steady and contented. When a family friend suddenly dies in a plane crash, the Austins open their home to an orphaned girl, Maggy Hamilton. The Austin children—Vicky, John, Suzy, and Rob—do their best to be generous and welcoming to Maggy.

Vicky knows she should feel sorry for Maggy, but having sympathy for Maggy is no easy thing. Maggy is moody and spoiled; she breaks toys, wakes people in the middle of the night screaming, discourages homework, and generally causes chaos in the Austin household. How can one small child disrupt a family of six? Will life ever return to normal?

Praise for Meet the Austins:

“A family story that simply doesn't date, characters ring as true now as I'm sure they ever did.” —Charlotte Jones Voiklis, Granddaughter of Madeleine L'Engle

“Yes, by all means ‘meet the Austins,' for a nicer family would be hard to find. The book is beautifully written, with integrity and warmth, and young people are bound to identify with the characters, each a person in his own right, and to read absorbed from first page to last. Thoroughly recommended.” —Chicago Tribune

“An unusual book. . . . There are intimate details of home life that everyone will recognize with pleasure; there is great warmth in the family relationship, and it is movingly communicated.” —The New York Times

“Told with warmth and humor, this is a perceptive, forthright story of a loving and likeable family.” —Booklist

“Her books . . . tend to be about the intersection of some fantastic unearthly world and the ordinary world in which we live.” —Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket)

“. . . [an] ode to faith and family . . .” —Quin Hillyer, American Spectator


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

Über diesen Titel

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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Meet the Austins

The Austin Family Chronicles, Book 1By Madeleine L'Engle

Square Fish

Copyright © 2008 Madeleine L'Engle
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312379315

Meet the Austins

The Telephone Call

It started out to be a nice, normal, noisy evening. It was Saturday, and we were waiting for Daddy to come home for dinner. Usually he's home early Saturday, but this day he had a maternity case, and babies don't wait for office hours. Uncle Douglas was up for the weekend. He's Daddy's younger brother--ten years younger than Daddy--and he's an artist and lives in New York, and we all love him tremendously.

Mother had a standing rib roast cooking in the oven, because it's Uncle Douglas's favorite, and the kitchen smelled wonderful. Uncle Douglas and John were out in the old barn working on John's space suit, but the rest of us were in the kitchen. I don't suppose we're what you would call an enormous family, Mother and Daddy and the four of us children and the animals, but there are enough of us to make a good kind of sound and fury. Mother had music on, Brahms's Second Piano Concerto, kind of loud to drown us out. Suzy was performing anappendectomy on one of her dolls. She was doing this at the same time that she was scraping carrots, so the carrot scraper was a scalpel as well as a scraper.

Rob was supposed to be helping her, both with the appendectomy and the carrots, but he'd become bored, so he was on the floor with a battered wooden train making loud train noises, and Colette, our little gray French poodle, was barking at him and joining in the fun. Mr. Rochester, our Great Dane, was barking at one of the cats, who was trying to hide behind the refrigerator. I was being angelically quiet, but this was because I was doing homework--a whole batch of math problems. I was sitting near the fireplace and the fire was going and I was half baked (that's for sure, John would say) on one side, but I was much too cozy to move.

"Clamps," Suzy said loudly to an invisible operating-room nurse. "Retractors."

"Choo choo choo chuff chuff chuff," Rob grunted.

The Brahms came to an extra-loud part and everything was happy and noisy and comfortable.

Mother opened the oven door and poked at the potatoes roasting around the beef. "Vicky," she said, "why don't you go somewhere a little quieter to finish your homework?"

"Do I have to?" I asked.

"It's up to you," Mother said. "Suzy and Rob, please keep it down to a quiet roar."

Then the telephone rang.

Heaven knows, with Daddy being a doctor, we're used to the telephone. It rings all night as well as all day. We have two separate phone numbers, and when you call one it rings only athome, and when you call the other it rings both in Daddy's office and at home. John and I are the only ones allowed to answer the office phone, but when it's the house phone the younger ones run for it, too.

This was the house phone, and Suzy dropped her doll in the middle of the operation and ran. Rob shrieked, "It's my turn! I'll get it!" It really was his turn, but Suzy kept on running and Rob shrieked louder, especially because she got to the phone before he did. Mother turned down the volume on the record player and shouted at Mr. Rochester to stop barking and told Rob that he could answer next time, and Suzy said in a breathless voice, "Hello, this is Suzy Austin, who is this, please?" There was a moment's silence; then she said, more loudly, "But who is speaking, please?" and then she held the receiver out to Mother, saying, "Mother, it's for you, and I don't know who it is. I thought it was Aunt Elena but she didn't say hello to me or anything, so it couldn't be."

Mother went to the phone and I put my math book down on the floor and Mother glared at me and said, "Be quiet, Vicky!" as though I were hammering or something, and I knew something was wrong.

Then Mother said, "Oh, Elena, oh no!" and it was the strangest thing, looking at her, to see her get white beneath her summer brown. And then she said, "What can we do?" and then she was quiet for a long time, and then she said, "Oh, Elena, darling--" as though she were going to say something more, but she didn't say anything more, and then she hung up.

She stood there by the phone without saying anything, and Suzy said, "Mother, what is it? What is it?" and Mr. Rochesterbegan to growl, and Rob said, in the terribly serious voice he gets when he thinks something important is going on, "Mr. Rochester, I think you'd better be quiet."

Mother said, "Vicky, go get Doug."

It wasn't dark yet, because we were still on daylight saving, but it was cold, windy cold, the way it gets around the time of the first frosts, and I ran across the brittle grass to the barn, shivering; I wasn't sure whether I was shivering because I was cold or because something awful had happened.

 

When I got to the barn John was in the space suit. He and Uncle Douglas had been working on it ever since last Christmas, when Uncle Douglas was up. It has a space-band radio, and a tank of oxygen and something-or-other mix, and in the helmet are all kinds of controls for the radio and air and heat and drinking water and even aspirin, because that was the only kind of pill Daddy would let John have. John spends every penny of his allowance on his space suit, and every penny he can earn mowing lawns or chopping wood or even baby-sitting if nothing else is available, and I'm sure Uncle Douglas slips him extras, though he's not supposed to, for things like the rubber gaskets John said he absolutely had to have. It's quite a space suit, and it won first prize for the state at the Science Fair.

They were so busy they didn't hear me, John in the helmet and Uncle Douglas wearing earphones. I knew the kind of thing they were saying: "Firefly calling Little Bear. Come in, Little Bear." And: "Little Bear to Firefly, shift to directional frequency at two centimeters." I pulled Uncle Douglas's sleeve.

He kind of brushed me away. "Just a minute, Vicky."

I pulled harder. "Uncle Douglas! Please!" I knew they couldn't hear me, but I babbled on, "Mother wants you right away. Aunt Elena called and I think something bad's happened."

Uncle Douglas must have seen by my face that I wasn't just interrupting them to invite them in for a cup of tea. He pulled off his earphones. "What?"

I told him again.

He spoke through the mike to John, told me to wait till John got out of the space suit, and ran out of the barn and across the lawn.

It takes John a good five minutes to get either in or out of his space suit. He lifted off his helmet and put it carefully on its shelf. "What's happened, Vic?" he asked me.

"I don't know," I said. "Aunt Elena called. And then Mother sent me out to get Uncle Douglas."

We didn't say anything else in all the minutes it took John to get out of his space suit. We were both afraid of the same thing. If Aunt Elena called, and it was something bad--and I knew that it was something bad--it must be about Uncle Hal.

Aunt Elena and Uncle Hal aren't our real aunt and uncle, but we love them as though they were. Aunt Elena was Mother's roommate at school in Switzerland and they've been best friends ever since. Aunt Elena is a concert pianist, and she plays all over the country and in Europe, too. Uncle Hal, her husband, is a jet pilot.

Now, we all knew Uncle Hal's work was dangerous, but he was so...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Square Fish
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312379315
• ISBN 13: 9780312379315
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar