in this fateful hour

I’ll be surprised if anyone reading this hasn’t already heard this news already, but Madeleine L’Engle died of natural causes yesterday at the age of 88.

Like the Dark is Rising sequence, A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet were treasures of my childhood. Later on, I picked up A Ring of Endless Light and Troubling a Star, but it was definitely the original three that left the strongest impression on me. In fact, I just bought them a year or two ago for the daughter of one of my mom’s coworkers to encourage her to read more (her brother, a big Star Wars buff, got the first 4 X-Wing books).

I…don’t really have much else to say, except that the world has lost something very precious.