And Both Were Young

Before Madeleine L'Engle wrote about tesseracts and time travel, she wrote this quiet, aching novel about the wounds we carry into love. Flip Hunter has just lost her mother and been shipped off to a Swiss boarding school, where she doesn't fit in with the sophisticated European girls and spends her happiest hours alone in the mountains with her sketchbook. Then she meets Paul by Lake Geneva, a French boy whose memory has been scoured clean by the war. He can't remember his past, and Flip is drawn to help him recover what was lost even as she navigates her own grief and growing feelings for him. Their secret romance unfolds against the haunting backdrop of Lake Geneva and the medieval Chateau de Chillon, two characters learning that loving someone means sometimes holding their pain alongside your own. This is L'Engle at her most tender: not the grand cosmic imagination of her later work, but something closer to the bone, about the first heartbreak and the first time we realize another person's suffering is not theirs alone to carry.