The Moment of Tenderness offers 18 short stories by Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007), author of more than 60 books, including the beloved 1963 Newbery Medal-winning A Wrinkle in Time. In "The Birthday," a young girl struggles to understand the mysterious illness that has left her mother incapacitated, while in "Summer Camp," a girl learns the cruelty of others as she's bullied for her emotional letter-writing. "A Room in Baltimore" tells the story of two aspiring actresses going door to door to find room at an inn. And "The Foreigners" tracks the social upheaval in a small community after the entrance of two outsiders.
These stories are stand-alone works written in the 1940s and 1950s (some previously published and others appearing here for the first time), but they all still embody the same soft-footed, timeless elegance of L'Engle's emotional and aesthetic sensibility. Her ability to peer into the mundanities of life to find surreal, divine mysteries is apparent in each. Some stories, such as "Madame, Or..." remain grounded in reality, while "Poor Little Saturday" departs into the enchanting world of fantasy for which L'Engle has become best known. But at the heart of it all, like the motif that begins many of the collection's best stories, is the focal character, peering out a window at a group of people she cannot quite reach and a gradually changing world. No matter the age of L'Engle's characters, these are coming-of-age stories, built on a foundation of nostalgia, yearning and uncertainty, that ask, in 18 different ways, "after we have made the great decision to leave the security of childhood and move on into the vastness of maturity, does anyone ever feel completely at home?" --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor