Meet the Austins is largely episodic; each chapter covers a specific incident such as Vicky's bicycle accident or a family vacation.

Although Meet the Austins, as the name implies, is the family's first appearance in terms of the publication date, a short, later book, The Twenty-Four Days Before Christmas (1964), takes place five years earlier.

Meet the Austins is followed, in terms of internal chronology as well as publication date, by the full-length novels The Moon by Night (1963), The Young Unicorns (1968), A Ring of Endless Light (1980) and Troubling a Star (1994).

In 1997, the hardcover publisher of L'Engle's novels from 1962 on, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, issued a new edition of Meet the Austins that for the first time incorporated the chapter.

However, the next book in the series, The Moon by Night, includes a scene in which Vicky tells Zachary Gray about the Anti-Muffin club, in very nearly the same text that introduces it in the originally-omitted chapter.