Summary: Polly, Charles, and Dr. O’Keefe travel to Venezuela by ship and meet 13-year-old Simon Renier (the main character) and his uncle, also traveling to Venezuela.
At some point, I will have read most of L’Engle’s novels. I believe that I have twelve of her novels and six of her memoir or other non-fiction books. But I find them wildly uneven. Dragon in the Water is in the O’Keefe series but is mostly about Simon Renier, not Charles and Polly. Simon is a 13-year-old being raised by his great-aunt, who is in her late 80s. They are from a family with a long history in the Southern US, but it has been influenced by their ancestor’s work with Simon Bolivar in freeing South and Central America from Spanish rule.
One of the minor themes of the book is that Simon’s ancestor returned from South America and ended slavery on their plantation and the former slaves worked together with the family in a type of commune. While that is unlikely to have been based on any real events, L’Engle still presents Simon and his Aunt as denying any good from slavery but being against members of their family that worked with northern agents during the reconstruction era. And it appears that even if L’Engle was trying not to engage in Lost Cause thinking, she still falls into it, even as she says directly in the book that she denies Lost Cause ideology.
This is sort of a mystery. A prominent character is murdered, and the rest of the book is oriented toward finding the murderer and seeking out the truth about the historical characters that have influenced the story. Overall, the book was okay. It was not great, but not awful. L’Engle does try to take ideas seriously, just as she did with House Like a Locus, but those ideas end up not translating all that well in the more than 40 years since it was published.
But the bigger problem than the ideas of freedom and southern pride is the plot is a bit of a mess, and L’Engle again tries to romantically pair the teen girl with someone about 7 years her senior and does not have a romantic orientation with the teen that is very close to her age. This is an ongoing issue for L’Engle. There is a type of Native American spirituality that comes up in several of her books. I think she tries to handle it well, but I am not sure she has done the requisite work.
In the end novels have to work well as stories, not just as a means to discuss ideas. In this case, I think the weaknesses as a story are larger than the problems with the ideas. However, Dragons in the Waters was quick and I bought it cheap, so I was fine reading it.
Dragons in the Water by Madeline L’Engle (O’Keefe series #2) Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook