Meg Murry, nuestra protagonista, tiene problemas para adaptarse en la escuela, es difícil adivinar que sus padres son científicos. Su padre desapareció tiempo atrás en extrañas circunstancias, pero la mamá no ha perdido la esperanza de volver a verlo. Su hermano pequeño, Charles, es un no prodigio; su mente posee una percepción excepcional que le permite más allá de las apariencias. Es esa habilidad la que les permitirá encontrarse con las señoras Qué, Cuál y Quién, y descubrir que detrás de ellas se esconde un increíble secreto, "la arruga en el tiempo" que puede llevarlos a otros mundos. Justo lo necesario para emprender la búsqueda de su padre perdido, ¿no creen? En el espacio exterior no existe el aire, así que respira hondo y prepárate a viajar junto a Meg, Charlie y su amigo Calvin para averiguarlo.
Ese libro es un clásico inclasificable de la literatura juvenil. Me encantó

4/10/12 Okay, this is the longer review. The added bit follows the dashed line ---

I learned about this outstanding book and its brilliant author from
Catie’s wonderful review  and blog post. Yes, I should have known about it many years ago, but this was a gap in my experience. To make up for lost time, I now have the boxed-set series of 5 books for my family.

This is a wonderful adventure story for children - one that speaks to them as adults, and conveys a bundle of important life-concepts without getting weighed down by them.

It is also a great book for re-acquainting adults with the potentials of life - and the critical importance of faith - even as we deal with hard and often scary realities.

My review won’t be nearly as good as Catie’s - in part because she has read the book from both a child’s and an adult’s perspective, and in part because she just writes fabulous reviews (not to mention the artist renderings!). However, I will follow Catie's suggestion and focus mainly on my perspective as an adult, reading this for the first time.
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At one level, this is a delightful - but harrowing - children’s adventure in a science fictional setting. The story is centered around a strong, smart girl named Meg, and her intuitively wise and precocious younger brother, Charles Wallace. The interplay between these two is a beautiful thing to see.

Charles Wallace: “It’s being able to understand a sort of language, like sometimes if I concentrate very hard I can understand the wind talking with the trees. You tell me, you see, sort of inad—inadvertently. That’s a good word, isn’t it? I got Mother to look it up in the dictionary for me.”

The narrative very cleverly promotes timeless values of family, loyalty and love. It also edges the reader toward a growing realization - that perseverance is critical to success in any difficult endeavor. It is the kind of book that you really want your kids to read and understand, and to come back to as they get older.

Meg: This has been the most impossible, the most confusing afternoon of my life, she thought, yet I don’t feel confused or upset anymore; I only feel happy. Why?

At another level this is a story for adults, but told from a child’s perspective. The adult story, when you step back and think about it, is a circle of ideas that are connected and interdependent. Within that circle are knowledge - what we know and what we don’t; reasoning to solve problems, even when you are too scared to think clearly; the importance of faith - that there are answers, even when you can’t see them; and a related kind of faith, that you can and must act without knowing some of the most critical facts.

Charles Wallace got his look of probing, of listening. I know that look! Meg thought suddenly. Now I think I know what it means! Because I’ve had it myself, sometimes, doing math with Father, when a problem is just about to come clear...

This is all grownup stuff, the sort of thing that philosophers have trundled on about for millennia. But the lessons here are concepts for living, simply stated, and at their core are simple truths that are easily lost in the day-to-day. We humans know a great deal, about a great many things, and (like Meg) we can reason our way through tough challenges to a brighter future. But arrogance about our knowledge can lead us to think we are masters of all around us. In the book, experiments with tesseracts are a great example. The experiments are in a noble cause, but they lead down a very dark path. In the bigger picture we know pathetically little, and all our knowledge is but a tiny scratch on the surface of what IS.

What she saw was only the game Mrs Whatsit was playing; it was an amusing and charming game, a game full of both laughter and comfort, but it was only the tiniest facet of all the things Mrs Whatsit could be.

And here is the critical point that is so well expressed in the narrative. We have to take our pathetically limited knowledge, and our dangerous arrogance, and get on with it. And when we fail, or things go wrong, we get angry and point fingers, just as Meg does here. As our brains scream about fears and anger, and point us in a lot of wrong directions, we have to pull ourselves together and move forward, using our limited working knowledge and accepting that we have to find answers as we go along. All of this involves faith, of different sorts and in shifting applications.

“What can I tell you that will mean anything to you? Good helps us, the stars help us, perhaps what you would call light helps us, love helps us. Oh, my child, I cannot explain! This is something you just have to know or not know.”

“You mean you’re comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it?” “Yes.” Mrs Whatsit said. “You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.”

In short, all of us must proceed into the darkness and reach for the light. For me, reading as an adult, that is what this book was all about.

Very Highly Recommended.

This Newbery Award winner was the first novel by the prolific L'Engle (1918-2007) that I ever read; but although I'd heard of her before, I didn't discover her work for myself until I was in my 40s. That I liked it as an adult is indicative; it was marketed to younger readers, and has main characters who are, I'd guess, young teens (another is just five years old), but it isn't at all shallow or juvenile in its characterizations, plotting, or general execution. (L'Engle herself has stated that when she writes, she simply tells a story without picturing the listeners as any particular age, and leaves it to her publishers to market it as they choose.) Adults can certainly appreciate this one.

Two or three generations of would-be gurus of writing technique have held up the sentence, "It was a dark and stormy night" as a supposed textbook example of a poor beginning for a fictional work (unfairly, in my opinion, since there's nothing intrinsically wrong either with opening the tale in such a setting, or with starting by calling attention to it!). That L'Engle deliberately picked that sentence to start this novel says something about her audacity and disdain for convention. That the novel in question then went on to win a coveted major literary award says a lot about her writing skills.

Basically, this tale sends young Meg and her schoolmate Calvin, along with Meg's precociously bright little brother, traveling to other worlds in an effort to find and rescue her missing father (who's a brilliant scientist, as is her mother). The means of this travel is a tesseract, the titular "wrinkle in time" posited in 1888 by British mathematician Charles Howard Hinton (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract ). Although L'Engle's science fiction isn't typically associated with the genre's "hard" tradition, the science here is legitimate. (For some further discussion of it, with particular reference to this novel, check out https://geekdad.com/2014/03/tesseracts/ .) But the author's main interest isn't in imparting a science lesson. As in all great literature in any genre, her fundamental concerns are psychological and moral/philosophical --and in this case spiritual, because while L'Engle's Christian content here is subtly expressed, she was an evangelical Christian whose worldview shapes her work, here as elsewhere. (By her own statement, for instance, she viewed Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Whatsit as angels; and it isn't hard for Christian readers to identify the malevolent cosmic entity designated here as the Dark Thing.) The characters' real challenges are moral and spiritual, and have to be fought within themselves.

As a side note, it's profoundly unfortunate that this work has sometimes been denounced, not so much by secularist critics as by avowedly Christian reviewers, who imagine it to be inimical to the faith (a reaction that never ceased to amaze the author, during her lifetime). Briefly, one main ground of attack have been that Jesus is cited (first) in a list of those from our planet who have been fighters against the evil and darkness of the Dark Thing --supposedly, this reduces Jesus' uniqueness. Suffice it to say that I had no such negative reaction in reading that passage in the book; I took it as a very pro-Jesus affirmation, and I think 99.999% of serious readers would. (Generally speaking, the New Testament calls upon humans to be co-fighters with Jesus against evil.) The other complaint is that a character called the Happy Medium uses a crystal ball for scrying (locating missing persons or objects in the present); those who object to this equate it with the kind of divination (foretelling future events) forbidden in Deuteronomy 18:11. But humans are banned from trying to foretell the future because it's knowledge that belongs to God and isn't ours to know, unless He shares it with us. The location of present-day lost persons or objects is an entirely different category of knowledge; it certainly isn't forbidden to humans. (If it were, it would be a sin, for instance, to look for misplaced eyeglasses, or to try to locate missing children!) This doesn't mean that scrying is a technique that actually works for such purposes --this is fiction, after all!- it simply means that if incantational magic DID work, this wouldn't be a morally illegitimate purpose for it.

As Goodreads indicates, this is the first entry in a five-book series. I've never actually pursued the latter any further; but this 1991 printing of the book has an accompanying genealogy of the Murry and O'Keefe families that appear in the series, as well as a list of L'Engle characters in the broader Kairos series (which includes this one) and which books they appear in. (Interestingly, although I'd never noticed it before, it turns out that although The Other Side of the Sun --which I've also read and liked, though I haven't reviewed it yet-- isn't part of the Kairos series, Stella and Theron's children and grandson do figure in some books of the latter. It's a small world! :-) )

I JUST read this book for the first time, and it was BEAUTIFUL. The writing is exactly why I adore childhood classics (how can they make the ordinary so magical; and the food is always so salivating) and then this tale took twist after twist...and it was utterly unique. I am a big fan. :)

"Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: you're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself."

So What's It About?

It is a dark and stormy night when Meg first discovers that the ordinary world she knows is in fact infinitely more marvelous and dangerous. Three strange women bring her news that her physicist father, who mysteriously vanished, is in desperate need of her help against a foe of unimaginable evil. Her quest to save her father -and the rest of the world- is one that will take all of her courage and wits to survive.

What I Thought

I remember reading this book for the first time when I was about 10 or so and being struck with the impression that, while it was interesting, it wasn't necessarily especially enjoyable. 10 year old Charlotte and current Charlotte are in agreement on that front.
As far as interesting goes, I'm principally occupied with the book's equal regard for Christian themes and scientific thought.

Science and religion are often treated as though they are opposite ends of a spectrum and in my opinion A Wrinkle in Time demonstrates that the two can in fact thrive in co-existance. The book's overall battle of light vs. dark draws from Christian allegory and alludes to angels as well as Jesus's contribution to the fight against IT.

At the same time, the book is suffused with scientific reasoning- Meg comes from a family of scientists and it shows in the way she views the world. While the fight against IT requires the faith of religion it also requires the rationality of science, shown for instance in delicate act of tessering.

I also thought that it was very interesting that the first portion of the book emphasizes the children's desperation to find their father, and in a lesser book the achievement of that goal would herald an end to their problems. Instead, they realize that adults are fallible and must continue to rely on their own courage and ingenuity:

"She had found her father and he had not made everything all right."

In addition, it certainly cannot be said that L'Engle's imagination is lacking- A Wrinkle in Time sees Meg and the gang encounter a fascinating variety of bizarre alternate worlds and creatures who inhabit them. Ultimately, the sheer strangeness of it all is what I ended up appreciating the most about this book.

I wish that I could add Meg's journey to better self-esteem to the list of things that I enjoyed, but unfortunately I found it to be one of the book's more lacking elements. Her initially self-disparaging and negative attitude is compassionately and accurately realized, but I never truly felt that any organic internal growth occurred. One minute she is thinking of herself as utterly useless and then the next she has somehow magically achieved the kind of self-actualization that usually takes months of work to achieve.

My biggest complaint, however, lies in the fact that I never found any of the three main characters to be particularly enjoyable children to spend time with. Charles Wallace, in particular, irritates me to no end. He walks around talking like a pompous 50 year old man in a 5 year old's body while everyone acts like he is the most amazing and incredible child in the world:

Charles Wallace put his hands on his hips defiantly. “The spoken word is one of the triumphs of man,” he proclaimed, “and I intend to continue using it, particularly with people I don’t trust.”

I think my irritation with Charles Wallace comes down to my underlying frustration with one of the book's messages, which seems to be that there are "normal" people like Sandy and Dennys who are all very well and good, but the truly important ones are "special" people like Charles Wallace. These people are the ones who are truly deserving of your ultimate attention and respect. It rubs me the wrong way becauae it strikes me as needlessly smug and elitist, especially for a children's book.

n  “We look not at the things which are what you would call seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal. But the things which are not seen are eternal.”n

If you want to try out a science fiction book, and you're a beginner then I'd recommend this one. Even though this is considered a YA book, I think it's more suited to be a middle grade one. It was well written with a conspicuous plot, but it didn't really leave me wanting for more. It was mediocre. So, that explains the three stars.

n  “Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself."n

A wrinkle in time is a heartwarming and adventurous story about travel through time and space. Meg and Charles and their classmate Calvin travel through space and time in search of Meg's and Charles's father. Their father is a scientist who was trying to fight an evil shadow that was often seen looming over the Earth's surface. However, his plans failed and he's now held prisoner, on a mysterious planet, by evil forces.

n  “There will no longer be so many pleasant things to look at if responsible people do not do something about the unpleasant ones.”n

The three children with the help of three Celestials, Mrs Which, Mrs Who and Mrs Whatsit fight the evil forces and restore happiness.
I also loved the philosophical aspects of this book.
The author brings out the strengths and weaknesses of every character in a beautiful way. The travel to different planets made me look at earth in a different point of view as I found myself visualizing myself as a Celestial. I loved all the characters for different reasons.

n  “We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.”n

CHARACTERS

Meg
Meg is determined to save her father, but her anxiousness blinded her from solving other problems that arose.

Charles
Charles is a very clever boy but he let his pride get in the way, and it didn't turn out that well for him.

Calvin O'Keefe
Calvin was kind and helpful when Meg yearned for warmth and affection. He was unwilling to take risks.

They were the perfect trio who were ready to fight anything that got in their way!

Will I continue reading this series?
Yes, I might. The book didn't really end on a cliffhanger so I might pick up the second book after a few days.

n  “Like and equal are not the same thing at all.”n

I'm sorry to disappoint you guys, but I did not think this was a great book. I realize I'm just now reading a book you've all loved for years, so I feel bad knocking something that's such a classic in children's literature. But honestly, it was a drag to read, and I'll tell you why. The characters are all either boring (Meg, Calvin) or unbelievable (Charles Wallace). The non-Earth settings are fully disconnected from each other and simply parodies of our world. The pacing is painful, with conversations that drag on and on while the characters discuss the obvious. I rarely found the writing clever or charming, but I did enjoy the plentiful quotations of other works (maybe because it was a break from L'Engle's writing), and I liked the part where Mrs. Whatsit sprained her dignity. If you want clever, read Snicket; if you want human, read Rowling; if you want epic, read Tolkien; if you want mind-bending, read Verne; if you want funny, read White or Cleary. I was looking for these things here but couldn't find them.

Meg is having trouble coping. It is hard being a teenager. It seems the only thing she likes in school is math. She is rather hyper-sensitive and temperamental. She is awkward socially and rather invisible among her teachers.

And yet her twin brothers are quite normal. Her baby brother Charles is gifted. Her father, known for working on a top secret mission with the government, hasn't been heard from in years.

And then...4 remarkable people burst into Meg's life and things change. An adventure ensues.

Years later, and Meg's character and her quirkiness still feels current. Relatable.

At the time, the book was almost not published because they didn't know how to categorize it. We can now consider it as magical realism or fantasy or a little bit of science fiction.

it has even been made into a film.

Any way you look at this story, it is an opportunity for children to imagine possibility and celebrate their uniqueness.

This post is part of the 2016 Classics Challenge.

WHEN I Discovered This Classic
It's a children's classic that I've been aware of since joining the book community. It's super popular in the US, but not so much in the UK. Last year, Puffin got in touch to offer me a bunch of newly redesigned and published Puffin Classics. I couldn't say no and requested A Wrinkle in Time.

WHY I Chose to Read It
A Wrinkle in Time is not only a highly-regarded classic (it won the 1963 Newbery Medal), but a much-beloved classic. I was excited to finally pick it up.

WHAT Makes It A Classic
It's a novel that is seen to be for 9 to 12-year-olds and yet tackles highly complex themes. Good vs. evil – illustrated in the story as light vs. dark – and conformity vs. freedom are woven into the plot. It's scientific and philosophical, and some say religious.

Jean Fulton wrote: "L'Engle's fiction for young readers is considered important partly because she was among the first to focus directly on the deep, delicate issues that young people must face, such as death, social conformity, and truth."

"A straight line is not the shortest distance between two points."

WHAT I Thought of This Classic
I was intrigued, particularly by the concepts of wrinkling time and tessering; folding the fabric of space and time. Meg, Charles and Calvin are promised that they'll travel from one area of space to another and arrive back home five minutes before they left. As for the characters, I adored 13-year-old Margaret "Meg" Murray and her younger brother, 5-year-old Charles Wallace, who is both a genius and telepathic. They are the key to saving their father, a scientist studying tesseract, who is being kept on the planet Camazotz.

A Wrinkle in Time is one of the few children's science fiction classics I've read. It's impressive, challenging and ambitious. As my experience of science fiction is limited to dystopia and post-apocalyptic – and so therefore much easier concepts to grasp – I just about got my head around the science. But I appreciate that it was explained. I attended an event about writing children's science fiction a few years ago and a comment was made that it's easier to write for children because there's less to explain. I'm sure Madeleine L'Engle wouldn't agree. Rather than simply "travelling through time", the reader becomes more invested in how this might happen and what could go wrong.

Even so, A Wrinkle in Time was often a little too bizarre for me, as someone who generally reads contemporary fiction. I was hoping that I'd get into the story much more than I did. But I thoroughly enjoyed the personal journey that the children went on and it's one I'd happily give another shot.

“The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.” 

WILL It Stay A Classic
I'm sure it'll continue to be popular within in the US, but it may be a little too peculiar to be reintroduced to the UK – but time will tell as a new adaptation is currently being made!

“They are very young. And on their earth, as they call it, they never communicate with other planets. They revolve about all alone in space."
"Oh," the thin beast said. "Aren't they lonely?”

WHO I’d Recommend It To
People who love science fiction. People who love stories about complex and challenging themes.

"We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts."

I also reviewed this book over on Pretty Books.

Madeleine L’Engle started writing this book the year I was born, and I think it has fared a bit better than me

So... this story actually begins with "It was a dark and stormy night". Awesome!

I love everything about this book ─ I love that the dialogue is old-fashioned, having been written in 1960 by a woman who was born in 1918; I love that biblical scripture was woven seamlessly throughout a story that relied upon quantum mechanics as it relates to time travel; I love that it deals with good versus evil and explains it as light versus dark in a simplistic fashion that makes it clear to children; I love the quirky characters; and, finally, I love the Murry's struggle against conformity. In an unrelated comment, it made me want to name a child after Charles Wallace, Meg's five-year-old child prodigy genius little brother ─ his comments on everything were precious. ;)



I also appreciated the pearls of wisdom that were dropped here and there...

n  "Though we travel together, we travel alone."n

n  "But, of course, we can't take any credit for our talents, it's how we use them that counts."n

n  "There will no longer be so many pleasant things to look at if responsible people do not do tsomething about the unpleasant ones."n

n  "Sometimes we can't know what spiritual damage it [evil] leaves even when physical recovery tis complete."n

There is a reason this book received a Newbery Medal, Sequoyah Book Award and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. It's that good.

Read this as part of 2018 Ultimate Reading Challenge, Category: "A book by an author you haven’t read before".

Buddy Read with Nameeta.

This book has won many awards and is considered one of a kind when it was published in 1962. This has a unique mix of fantasy and science fiction still retaining a spiritual undertone to it. Sounds fascinating, doesn't it? But the fact is even though there is all this potential in the story it falls short of 'all it could have been'.

The story is from the perspective of Meg whose parents are scientist and her father has been missing from past couple of years. Now this has a decent start but to really like a book you need to connect to its characters. I found Meg really really irritating. There were times when she threw a hissy fit and all I wanted to do was smack her in the face. Not a very noble thought but that's the reaction she got from me most of the times.

Apart from that I felt all the other characters are two dimensional. There was no character development whatsoever....

There is talk of 5th dimension and I really liked the concept. But I wanted more on this and less on the other nonsensical things going on and overall I just felt very unsatisfied.

There are beings from other galaxies and this part was most interesting. Atleast for me this was one saving grace which did not make it a 1 star read.

The ending is very anti-climatic. We are building towards this epic ending and then it ends just like that. I was like...


All I can say is this book could have gone the other way for me if Meg was a more endearing character and the focus was the 5th dimension and other galaxies rather than Meg and her tantrums.