An Acceptable Time was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1989, the fifth and final volume of the Time Quintet. Polly O’Keefe — Meg and Calvin’s daughter, now sixteen — is staying with her grandparents (the Murrys) in Connecticut when she accidentally slips three thousand years into the past through a “time gate” that opens near the family’s star-watching rock.
She finds a world where a community of druids (who crossed the Atlantic centuries before Columbus) coexists with a Native American People of the Wind. Both groups are threatened by drought. A druid named Zachary Gray (a recurring character from L’Engle’s other novels, here dying of a heart condition) has also traveled back and is willing to allow Polly to be sacrificed if it will bring rain and save his own life.
The novel addresses L’Engle’s most difficult theological question directly: does God demand sacrifice? The druids believe yes; Bishop Colubra (a twentieth-century Episcopal bishop who also travels back) insists no. L’Engle resolves the conflict through self-offering rather than coerced sacrifice — Polly volunteers herself, and the act of willing love transforms the situation without requiring death.
Collecting An Acceptable Time
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1989): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $25–$60
- Signed first: $60–$120