Review of The Arm of the Starfish by Madeleine L'Engle

Kythe42's Astral Library

I've been a book worm for pretty much my whole life. I've read many types of books over the course of my life, but currently the sorts of books I enjoy the most are fantasy and science-fiction. I particularly like it if these genre's are mixed with comedy like the style of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. I definitely can enjoy more serious fantasy and science-fiction though. I also enjoy vampire books, but not quite as much as I did when I was younger.

I'm not going to add any books to my shelves that I read before 2012 just because I've read so many books in my life and it's difficult to remember when I read them and how well I liked them, and I'm sure there are a great many books that I've read in my life that I've completely forgotten about.

The editions that I have displayed on my shelves do not necessarily correspond to editions that I actually own. I generally just use whatever edition has my favorite cover which may or may not match the covers of the books I actually own. If I own more than one copy of a book, in most cases I won't have multiple editions displayed on my shelves. An exception to this would be collective books/omnibuses in which the individual stories are all available separately. In this case I will probably use the individual books for tracking my reading, but will display the omnibus or anthology just as a book that I own.

Because BookLikes does not have any suitable way to track re-reading books, I have created a shelf called "all books read" in which I will permanently place every book that I have read. Books that I am re-reading will get transferred back and forth between the official "read" shelf and the "planning to read" and "currently reading" shelves.

Review of The Arm of the Starfish by Madeleine L'Engle

12:34 pm 28 September 2014

The Arm of the Starfish - Madeleine L'Engle

The Arm of the Starfish by Madeleine L'Engle is the story of a young man named Adam Eddington who has landed a summer job abroad with a renowned marine biologist, Dr. Calvin O'Keefe. Due to unforeseen circumstances he winds up caught in the middle of an international conspiracy between Dr. O'Keefe and those that would steal his work. Adam must figure out who he can trust and decide whose side he wants to be on, but this decision is not as simple as he would like.

This book was an ok read. It was mostly a mystery thriller type novel with some light science fiction mixed in. The scientific concepts presented in the book were very interesting and there was a good bit of action as well. I'm not sure I entirely liked where the book ended though and felt it could have done with one more chapter to provide some additional closure, but I suppose the author wanted to leave that up to the reader's imagination. This book crosses over with L'Engle's Time Quintet series and features characters from that series, but all grown up with children of their own. This book takes place between books four and five of the Time Quintet and while it's not necessary to read the first four books before reading this book, I would recommend reading this book before reading the fifth book of the Time Quintet.