A Wrinkle in Time was one of my favorite books as a young reader. I decided to reread it after my adult daughter, Elise, recently read it. I felt a bit like my mother, who loved the Narnia books and discovered their religious underpinnings years after reading them. I had the same experience with L'Engle's Quartet which, to be honest, detracted from my enjoyment of them a bit. Each book seemed a bit preachier and scriptural which is not my cup of tea. This is not to say that the lessons preached - kindness, understanding, being caring custodians of our planet, the importance of science - are not worth learning! They are indeed, which is why I still love the first book in the series best of all.

Wow, what a great set of fiction. These contain that sense of wonder and awe at the beauty and mystery of God and His ways. Each book is a world within a world, and sometimes worlds within worlds.

I’m still reflecting on how sudden each book ends and how that’s representative of each characters actual experience from book to book. Each of their journeys end as suddenly as they start, and well, that’s the essence of only a “wrinkle” in time right? Uh, so great. These make me want to go back and do some literary analysis on all the things L’Engle did in each book. That kind of nerdy English student stuff I tasted when I was in college. If a set of books make me want to do that, that’s how I personally know they were exceptional.

After fully reading this series, it is my opinion that Madeline L’Engle belongs right up there with CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien and would’ve easily fit in with the rest of The Inklings. If you’ve only ever read A Wrinkle In Time, I can’t recommend pressing on to read the others in this series as they are now some of my most cherished stories. These are not just kid stories, these are wonderful fun reads for any age.

Going back and re-reading these four novels for the first time since I read them to my children when they were young was an exercise of pure joy. In the intervening years I had forgotten what a beautiful prose writer L'Engle was. Appropriate for the subject matter, the language she employs is indeed touched with the music of the spheres and reading her descriptions of these cosmic adventures is nothing short of magical for the reader and what grand adventures they are.

This story was easy to read and engaging. I recommend to anyone who enjoys a good book. I was sad to see it end and I look forward to seeing what else I can find from this author. This story was easy to read and engaging. I recommend to anyone who enjoys a good book. I was sad to see it end and I look forward to seeing what else I can find from this author.

This set of books are an amazing read for younger kids. they are very imaginative. and like so many other fantasy books I have re-read now that I am older offers a whole new insight and meaning into the mind of the writer.

The first books are some really crazy physics boiled down into a cute story. They are a lot to think about and it's fun to hurt your brain trying. The last two (I think, it's been a while) are less involved with science and focus more on a so-so storyline.

Somehow I got chose the wrong edition. I don't think that I have actually read any past A Wrinkle in Time. I didn't love that one so I didn't bother reading the others. A childhood classic I know but not one that I read as a child and not one I loved as an adult.

A Wrinkle in Time - 3 stars
A Wind in the Door - 3 stars
A Swiftly Tilting Planet - 2 stars
Many Waters - 1 star

Wow, apparently, I ignored a lot of ridiculousness in this series growing up. Took forever to go back through it

FAVORITE CLASSIC CHILDREN'S BOOKS

LOL &&&MANY WATERS;;;

Another classic series I read as a kid. I remember trying to grasp the idea of tesseract from the books "square a square" explanation and the two pictures of an ant and string. I remember looking up mitochondria in the Time Life book of the body and being excited they were real. Three of the many books that made me love reading, and of the handful that left a mark on me.

I hadn't read these books in many years and had never read Many Waters. I was surprised to find that I didn't love the books. They all seemed to involve simplistic moralizing (there's just good and evil, often with only minimal explanations of what makes something or someone evil), and certain parts really didn't age well. (particularly the issue in A Wind in the Door with Charles Wallace being bullied, which everyone agreed was up to him to resolve on his own) I actually enjoyed Many Waters the most, as it read like it was just a story instead of a lesson, the plot developed gradually in a natural arc, there were several different subplots going on, and the setting was interesting to me.

The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument.

I read the first story a long time ago; it was interesting to read it again this much later (I’m mainly doing so in preparation for reading the next two.)

A Wrinkle in Time is a very nice combination of fantasy and science fiction—in some ways, very much like Star Maker in that not only does it posit a universal divinity but that stars are also intelligent; unlike in Star Maker, however, stars do take part in the great fight between good and evil (though they have only a backstory role here).

The story is very much focused on Meg Murry, the oldest child in a family of four children, whose father has disappeared. He works for the United States government, and they say he’s fine but he hasn’t contacted them in a long time—I’m not sure they ever say exactly how long, but I get the impression for over a year. Everybody else in the community thinks he’s never coming back.

Meg would probably be a trouble-maker even without that burden; with it, she’s miserable.

IT, the incarnation of evil, offers solace and relief from that kind of pain by enforcing equality as uniformity. But it’s a lie. “IT could only give pain, never relieve it.” But IT has convinced those it takes over that the pain it gives is better than the pain that comes from knowing that other people have different opinions about you.

A Wind in the Door continues on the same theme, introducing strange new beings and traveling inward, rather than across the universe (though there’s a little bit of that, too, at least in imagination).

Both evil and good have new allies, and evil’s message is similar to that of IT in A Wrinkle in Time. Evil makes nothingness sound awfully nice, stating that “We are the ones who are glorious.”

When everything is nothing there will be no more war, no illness, no death. There will be no more poverty, no more pain, no more slums, no more starvation…

Stated like this, it is very reminiscent of a story or two in Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad, though here it is deadly serious. Evil is unNaming the world a piece at a time, and while this puts everyone in eventual danger it puts Charles Wallace in immediate danger. So Meg must join the song of life and Name or reName what evil endangers.

We are the song of the universe. We sing with the angelic host. We are the musicians. The farae and the stars are the singers. Our song orders the rhythm of creation.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet starts more clumsily than the first two, getting us caught up with all of the changes in the characters’ lives; where A Wind in the Door happened a year after A Wrinkle in Time, this third book takes place seven to ten years later. Oddly, where the previous books seemed to be placed somewhere in the near future, this one seemed to be more in the present or near past. The creatures are less imaginative, more standard fantasy, and Charles Wallace appears to have forgotten what happened in previous books.

I noted the similarity between A Wrinkle in Time and Star Maker, and here the similarity comes from a different direction: this is a series of travels through time, some real and some “projections”, which are mostly observational. To the extent that Charles Wallace affects the story, it is by shuttling information across generations, and the information is not exactly hidden from the people he’s shuttling it to anyway. Still an interesting story, but (a) confusing, and (b) less intriguing than the previous two.

My take on Many Waters is that it takes place around 1998 or so (“half a century” after the atomic bomb was first used) when scientists routinely travel to outer space. In this case that’s mostly just a frame around the real story which unravels in a different time and place altogether. It was a little hard to get into at first, because of the semi-paradisal nature of the place and time—it took me a couple of chapters to ignore the ahistorical elements. But once I realized what the author was doing, it made sense and turned into a very good story in a world halfway between an initial paradise and the modern mundane world.

The creatures are also interesting, again; though they draw on familiar ideas, L’Engle gives them all an interesting twist; and she also combines science with fantasy in a very nice way to both get the story going and to end it.