One of my favourites by this author. ( )

Decent plot. But the characters, the motivations, and L’Engle’s ever-present coincidences came across hokey at best. ( )

Mystery-adventure, very mildly fantasy--Charles dreams true, and the Quiztanas have healing powers. This was one of my favorites as a teen; it doesn't hold up quite as well as some of the others, I think because the cultural appropriation now rubs me the wrong way a little. Despite the title, no actual dragons.

This ties in to the Time Quartet in that Poly and Charles are Meg and Calvin's children (the oldest of seven). The connection is not made explicit here; they were introduced in The Arm of the Starfish.

The endpoint is set in South America (Venezuela).

The South Carolina background connects to one of her adult novels, The Other Side of the Sun.

Two secondary characters (and a third mentioned but offstage) are repeated from The Young Unicorns. ( )

I quite enjoyed this book, which was very L'Engle. Great characters, intriguing little mystery, you don't quite notice that the plot's rambling until midway through the book when it stops rambling and starts happening. The ending lost me, but, well, those type of endings often do. I just cannot seem to get into the mystical mood; once things get transcendent I am left standing on the dock waving rather sadly at all the people getting carried off by into ethereal heights. Nevertheless, a pleasant read. ( )

Poly (she still spells it with one "L" in this book) and Charles O'Keefe travel via freighter ship to South America with their father, who is on his way to investigate the effects of oil drilling on a Venezuelan lake. One of their traveling companions is Simon Renier, a young boy whose distant ancestor helped free Venezuela from colonial rule. The three children get to know the ship's crew as well as their fellow passengers, and the trip progresses, we learn that just about everyone has secrets to hide. The voyage is disrupted by a murder, and the investigation continues upon their arrival at port. As a counterpoint to this drama, another story unfolds about Simon's ancestors and a curse passed down through the generations.

The mystery story is solid and moves along quite nicely. That said, this book is more enjoyable for people who are already strongly attached to Murray/O'Keefe family and L'Engle's roving characters like Canon Tallis and Mr. Theo. When I first read this as a younger person (probably in the neighborhood of 13 or so), many of the references to the adults and their adult secrets were so subtle that they left me in the dark (most laughably, I was perpetually confused by comments about the ancestor's "seed" -- was he a farmer?) As usual, Poly, Charles and Simon are far too insightful, thoughtful, and perpetually gracious to seem like real live children, but this always strikes me as an easy premise to buy into in L'Engle's work -- she was always so perpetually gracious herself it's understandable she assumes everyone else is that way as well.