When Polly O'Keefe goes to stay with her grandparents, doctors Kate and Alex Murry, she expects life to be fairly sedentary. Kate is a microbiologist and a Nobel Prize laureate, and Alex is an astrophysicist studying the space/time continuum, and Polly has come to live with them to study for a few months. However, life at the Murry residence isn't quite what Polly had expected it to be. Far from being quiet and relaxing, strange things begin to happen, with no believable reason behind them.
With an earthquake and a brilliant flash of lightning, everything that Polly has felt was certain in life, and has even taken for granted, is changed. A time gate has opened on the Murry property and three people are caught up in the tesseract's sphere of influence: Bishop Colubra, Polly, and her acquaintance Zachary. Leaving the area of its influence could well mean death for them all. The time gate leads to a period roughly three thousand years in the past. A time when people still believed in human sacrifice in order to appease the gods and bring about that which they desire. A time when nothing could be certain, not even the safety of love.
Bishop Colubra has found three ogam stones and believes that the site of the Murrys' indoor pool was once sacred ground. His avid interest in ogam enables him to be able to speak and understand the language of the people on the other side of the time gate, and Polly is a quick study with languages. Neither had thought they would actually encounter Druids on the other side of the gate, but they have. The Druids, however, have no more control over the time gate than Polly or her companions. And their friendship may not be enough to keep Polly from becoming the Samhain sacrifice.
Will Polly be able to avoid the ill fate that many wish upon her? Or would it matter if she died in the past, for she was born in the future. Would it change anything? Questions which seem impossible to answer compound this poor girl's dilemma, questions which not even the Bishop or the Druids can answer. And if she must be sacrificed, who will do it? The warrior who has fallen in love with her? The Druid Karralys, or his student Anaral?
Madeleine L'Engle builds the suspense up extremely well. And not everything is quite what you'd expect from the clues she expertly drops along the way. Although this book is written for children, it too is a wonderful adventure from start to finish, and complex enough to keep an adult mind occupied and guessing at the outcome. I certainly had problems putting it down for any length of time, and even when I did manage to, I was thinking about it almost constantly.
Ms. L'Engle is the recipient of the Newberry Award Medal and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for her novel A Wrinkle in Time. An excellent website on both Ms. L'Engle and her books can be found at this location.
