An Acceptable Time

An Acceptable Time Review

An Acceptable Time was published in 1989, fifteen years after A Wind in the Door and more than a quarter century after the original A Wrinkle in Time. It completes the Time Quintet, but it is also a generational completion: the protagonist is Polly O’Keefe, daughter of Meg Murry and Calvin O’Keefe, and the setting is the Connecticut farm of Meg’s parents, Dr. and Mrs. Murry, who have appeared throughout the series as figures of intellectual authority and human warmth.

A time gate opens near the Murrys’ property, and Polly — spending the autumn before college with her grandparents — finds herself moving between the present and the world of three thousand years ago, when the land was inhabited by two peoples with different customs and a conflict that requires resolution. A young druid named Karralys and a bishop named Anaral are caught between their communities’ traditions around human sacrifice and the radical alternative that Polly, arriving from outside both cultures, represents.

The human sacrifice question is the novel’s moral centre, handled with the seriousness it deserves. L’Engle neither endorses the practice nor dismisses the cultural logic within which it makes sense. The question she poses — whether an innocent person can choose to sacrifice themselves for a community that will not otherwise survive — is continuous with the self-sacrifice themes that run through the entire quintet, from Meg’s risk in A Wrinkle in Time to Charles Wallace’s time journeys.

The novel is the most leisurely of the five, and some readers will find the extended middle section less driven than the earlier volumes. But as a conclusion to a series that has consistently asked what it means to love a person and a world enough to risk everything for it, An Acceptable Time provides a thoughtful final answer.

Our rating: 3.8/5

Polly O’Keefe and the Next Generation

An Acceptable Time was published in 1989 and represents a conscious generational handoff: Madeleine L’Engle shifts focus from Meg Murry — the protagonist who carried the first two Time Quintet novels — to Polly O’Keefe, Meg’s daughter from The Arm of the Starfish and other O’Keefe family novels. For readers who have followed the full sequence of L’Engle’s interconnected fiction, Polly’s appearance at the Murry farm carries the particular pleasure of watching a child who appeared in earlier books arrive at her own story.

L’Engle, born in New York in 1918 and living between a Manhattan apartment and rural Connecticut throughout much of her adult life, set An Acceptable Time on the Connecticut landscape she knew intimately. The Murrys’ farm — which appears throughout the series as a place of intellectual authority and human warmth, presided over by the physicist parents who represent L’Engle’s ideal of scientific and spiritual integration — is the physical anchor from which Polly’s time gate opens.

The Time Gate and Celtic New England

The ancient peoples Polly encounters belong to a pre-Columbian Celtic New England that L’Engle constructs with imaginative freedom rather than archaeological exactness. The druid Karralys and the bishop Anaral belong to communities whose religious practices include human sacrifice, and L’Engle’s treatment of this element is the novel’s most serious moral engagement. She neither condemns the practice as simply barbaric nor excuses it as culturally relative; instead she examines the logic within which voluntary sacrifice makes sense, and asks whether that logic can ever be separated from coercion.

This question is not incidental to the series. Self-sacrifice — the willingness of one person to give everything for a community — has been L’Engle’s central moral theme since A Wrinkle in Time, where Meg risks herself to save Charles Wallace. Each subsequent volume has asked the question again under different conditions: A Wind in the Door’s Naming, A Swiftly Tilting Planet’s time journeys, Many Waters’ antediluvian choices. An Acceptable Time provides the quintet’s final answer by placing the question in its oldest context.

A Satisfying Conclusion

The novel is the most unhurried of the five, and some readers will find its pace meditative rather than driven. But as a conclusion to a series that has asked, across twenty-seven years of publication, what it means to love a world and its people enough to act rather than merely to feel, it offers the kind of final statement that long series rarely achieve.

The Circle Closes

An Acceptable Time (1989), the fifth and final Time book, follows Polly O’Keefe — daughter of Meg and Calvin — as she is drawn three thousand years into the past at her grandparents’ Connecticut farm, into a confrontation between two ancient peoples and the threat of human sacrifice during a drought. It brings the quintet’s preoccupations with time, faith and self-giving love to their close.

Polly’s journey across three thousand years pivots on whether she will be offered as a blood sacrifice to break a drought, and L’Engle uses that ancient terror to dramatise the same questions of faith and willing self-gift that animate the earlier books. Though published as the fifth Time book, it also draws Polly O’Keefe in from L’Engle’s separate Austin novels, knitting her two fictional worlds together at the end of the sequence and giving the quintet a quiet, valedictory close.

L’Engle once observed that she wrote for children because they were still open to the largest questions, and the novel’s blend of archaeology, theology and time travel trusts its young readers to hold wonder and danger in the same hand without flinching from either.