A Wrinkle in Time

This very rarely happens to me but I believe I will enjoy the movie more than the book. I don't have much luck with classics and this novel is a perfect example. It didn't live up to the hype for me.
This science-fiction fantasy novel follows a 13 yr old girl, Meg Murry, on a journey through time and space with her younger brother, Charles Wallace Murry, and their new friend, Calvin O'Keefe, to rescue her father from the evil that holds him prisoner on another planet.
I have mixed emotions as I read this classic novel. I had to constantly remind myself that this was categorized as children's literature and that it was published in the 1960's. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more if I read it when I was a child.

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.

I expected to really like this book. Its won several awards, and over the years I've always heard generally good things about it.

So what happened?

Truthfully, it's hard to pinpoint exactly. To explain in broad strokes, I just never connected with the story. There seemed to be little, if any, internal logic to the events that happen. There is no reason why the children are burdened with such a delicate "life or death" task that they could easily screw up. There's no reason why they are "helped" until the very end, where they are suddenly supposed to be able to solve some hokey battle of wits to survive and rescue someone.

The characters are almost as unlikable as the thin plot. Meg, the oldest child, complains incessantly and is scared the whole time. Her little brother, Charles Wallace, is interesting because of his strange ability to feel what someone's thinking, but it's never explained why he is like this. He seems way too precocious for his age, even for someone with his ability. Calvin, the random kid thrown into the story for seemingly no reason at all, has zero personality and exists solely to hold Meg's hand every time she's scared (which is all the time) and to boost her fragile ego with a few compliments.

Like a lot of young adult fiction, A Wrinkle in Time falls into the trap of pitting an absolute "good" versus an absolute "evil." However, even this cosmic battle of good and evil is poorly defined. Examples of people who are fighting the "good" fight, according to the story, are Jesus, Buddah, and Gandhi. The "bad" is represented by a dark cloud and an extra-dimensional being called "It" who controls an entire planet of people like some 1950's cartoon version of a brainwashing socialistic dictatorship. I found it strange that the most evil thing that entire galaxies are fighting against does not desire chaos, power, or bloodshed, but a passive mind control through which its victims sacrifice individuality for equality. Wow, that's...so...evil? It's like reading Red Scare propaganda from the 1950's.

L'Engle kills the tone of this story by peppering the narrative with strange, out-of-place declarations of Christian belief. For a story that seems largely secular, the odd Bible quotes and religious one-sidedness felt out of place. In a world where an unseen God can murder all of humanity with a flood and wind up on the "good" list, while an egalitarian dictator who asserts its will without killing anyone is on the "evil" list, sign me up for the latter.

I could never get into this story. There were okay bits here and there, but nothing cohesive enough to matter. At least it was refreshing to read a YA book where the parents aren't dead. Most of the time it seems a kid can't have any fun in literature unless their parents have kicked the bucket.


Maybe I would have enjoyed this book more as a child, but as an adult who has read a lot of fiction, this felt like it was slapped together without and real meaning or direction.

I do not like Meg. I really do not like Meg. She's a stubborn, whiny little brat.

I wasn't all that into this story until they got to the planet of Camazotz. Then it becomes sort of like a kids' book version of Brave New World, with "IT" instead of "soma."
"On Camazotz we are all happy because we are all alike. Differences create problems."
"We let no one suffer. It is so much kinder simply to annihilate anyone who is ill."

I'm not terribly wild about the in-your-face religious references in the book. That sort of thing needs to be used subtly or not at all. But perhaps this was more prevalent at the time the book was written.

Mrs. Whatsit is my favorite character. I think I'll start taking my fashion tips from her. I like Mrs. Who, also, with all her goofy quotes.

A Wrinkle in Time begins in a deceptively normal way: on a night with wind-tossed trees and a howling rain storm. From there, award-winning author Madeleine L'Engle takes readers literally to the stars and beyond in this extraordinary coming-of-age fantasy novel.

I first read about the adventures of Meg, Charles Wallace and Calvin when I was eleven or twelve years old. It was during my early bookworm phase, when I was still learning there were genres that I enjoyed more than others.

I was swept up in the adventure part of this story- facing down the shadows and 'It' in my subconscious mind and heart. I remember thinking the Aunt Beast portion of the story was boring and being disappointed Meg's father was a real man with flaws rather than a superhero who could solve all of her problems.

Looking back on that interpretation now, I see my own burgeoning psychological development and the belief that my parents were some kind of godlike beings- something that most if not all children pass through at some point or another. When did you discover that your parents were real and fallible, just like you?

However, listening to the audiobook as a fully grown adult with a daughter of my own, I was struck by Meg's strength and bravery. It takes a great deal of inner resolve to face down society's expectations and the numbing experience of living soullessly every day, following someone else's school or work schedule and agenda. (A real life version of the pulsing, all-encompassing brain of L'Engle's fantasy world.)

How many days have I awoken only to race off to the hamster wheel of the work week- toiling away so the highly-paid minds of the CEOs could rest easy, knowing that the company was producing product (whatever industry that may be) and providing value for the shareholders? More than I'd care to admit, before I discovered the safe haven of the librarian's world.

In my own effort to find my calling, I was reminded of Meg's struggles to survive her encounter with It, not just survive but decide how her body and mind should function. In some ways, the modern work experience feels like someone else dictates how many breaths you should take per minute or what rhythm your heart should beat.

I had the good fortune of listening to an audiobook that has L'Engle speaking a brief introduction and then an afterword read by one of L'Engle's granddaughters.

The granddaughter (I'm embarrassed I don't remember her name) shared the details and struggles of L'Engle's life- including the rejection of her manuscript by numerous publishing houses and the shade some readers threw her way for their own interpretations of her story. Some claimed the book was too overtly Christian while others thought it promoted witchcraft. Her granddaughter said L'Engle was baffled by the hate mail.

Curious how a reader's lens of perception shapes the experience you have with a book. As I mentioned earlier, as a child I thought this book was a grand adventure. As an adult, I see it as a metaphor for living in the modern world.

I'm keen to have my own reluctant reader try this book and share what she thinks about it.

Recommended for everyone but especially those who find themselves a beat or two out of step with the proverbial Its of the modern world. This book reminds you that you're not alone.

This book will outlive time itself.

A Wrinkle in Time has that Thing I can't describe, this special element that I haven't seen in any other book. There's magic, there's physics, there's fantasy, and friendship and loyalty and courage and anything else you can imagine. This is that book. It's the book you will read over and over again, not because of the intricate plot or complex world-building, not even because of the characters, but because of the special Thing it contains.

I can't fathom the thought that I went a whole six years without rereading this. This book is so so so so special, and if you haven't read it, then damn I feel bad for you. I feel like I just went on an intergalactic journey with some of the most brilliant minds of our time.

There's a certain divide, or a line that my favorite authors can't cross with female protagonists, and that is their personalities and the way they are portrayed, and how they interact with other characters. Basically, I despise weak female protagonists. When I read this novel for the first time in sixth grade, I hadn't yet formed a solid opinion on Meg Murry, because I wasn't picky and I basically read anything that was given to me. But now? I just ... I love that bitch. With my whole entire heart.

Meg Murry is a frail, awkward, odd, intelligent girl that is faced with the daunting task of saving her father from The Dark Thing, AKA "IT" on another dimension called Camazotz. In the first 75% of the novel, it is evident that Meg Murry is very afraid. She isn't used to stepping out of her comfort zone, has always lived a normal, quiet life, and does not think she is at all capable of anything related to saving her father, let alone an entire dimension. And I think, overall, that is what makes her character growth so inimitable.

I think the thing we love the most about our favorite characters is not that they start off with a sturdy strength inside them, but that they are full of faults and flaws that they eventually overcome them. Why? Because it makes us proud. Because we, as imperfect humans, are given something to relate to.

That is why Meg Murry's journey is a special one. I'm tired of reading about characters that seem to know exactly what they're doing, where they're going, and who they are. In this book, I was able to see Meg's growth and how she learned to rely on herself, how she learned to stop putting her responsibilities in other people's hands, and how she learned to do things for herself. I loved watching how she learned to stop hating herself, and that she was worthy of love and worthy of every happy feeling in the world. She is not perfect, she is not a saint, she is none of that. And she has accepted that inevitable truth with all of her heart.

--

"I wanted you to do it all for me," Meg said. "I wanted everything to be all easy and simple ... So I tried to pretend that it was all your fault ... because I was scared, and I didn't want to have to do anything myself."

--

Meg wanted to reach out and grab Calvin's hand, but it seemed that ever since they had begun their journeyings she had been looking for a hand to hold, so she stuffed her fists into her pockets and walked along behind the two boys. I've got to be brave, she said to herself. I will be.

--

Growth comes in different forms, different seasons, different times, and no matter how infinitesimal Meg's may seem, it is part of her journey all the same.

The definition of a strong female protagonist is not one that has been strong from the beginning. It is one that has endured more than any could bear, one that has fallen, stood up, and kept going. These strong protagonists come in many shapes and forms, and Meg Murry is now added to my long list of favorites.

I automatically fell in love with the insta-love, insta-care, and insta-protectiveness. (I just made all of these terms up because I am cool.) Normally, I hate insta-love. Hate it with my entire being. But I just couldn't bring myself to feel any irritation towards it in this book because it is so well written and so lovely and just everything I needed today. I love how Calvin is immediately protective of Meg and he won't let anyone hurt her, how he refuses to let her cry on her own. I love how Meg has known Aunt Beast for approximately a few hours and departs from her arms with tears in her eyes, and "I love you," on the edge of her lips. I love that I love it so much, and I have no clue why, and in all honesty, if I read this in another book it would be completely, utterly weird, and I know I would hate it immediately. But this book ... it’s speshul bro

Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, Mrs Which, Charles Wallace, Mrs Murry, Calvin

why
are the characters
so beautiful
so wonderful
i can't explain it
i can't comprehend
- an exquisite, sad, lovestruck poem written by me

In every book, there are characters I would die for, and characters I would kill. Miraculously, A Wrinkle in Time has yanked the strings of my heart and has made me numb to all the hatred in the world. I can't bring myself to hate anyone in this book. Not even "IT", the antagonist. Why? BECAUSE IT'S WRITTEN SO WELL. I have absolutely no complaints about any of the characters whatsoever. They are all beautiful beans (except the Prime BitchCoordinator).

If I had to complain about one thing, it would be the method in which Meg defeats "IT". The love-conquers-all bit is a lil cheesy, which is completely understandable, seeing as how this book was published in 1962, and everything was cheesy back then. Overall, the plot had me at the edge of my seatbed the entire time, and still, six years later, I love it just the same and even more.

I know how sparse my five star ratings can be, but this book will always deserve its five stars. I don't think it will ever go down. This is a book that everyone has to read, because it is beautiful and heartbreaking (in how beautiful it is), and that ending, oh my god that ending, that last fucking page just shattered my soul because it. was. written. so. well.

Hopefully you get my point and are now rushing to the nearest library to check out this book. If you are not, The Dark Thing shall reawaken from the depths of the fifth dimension and will come find you. (I shall set it upon you.)

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! :-) )

Reread this, one of the great children's classics of all time, via books on tape on the road through the American west this early fall, with L'Engle herself, RIP, reading it! A real treat to hear her voice with her own magic words. A book she tells us almost didn't make it to print because the publishing industry couldn't figure how to categorize it… they thought it was too deep for kids, etc. Great book, must read.