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.

these books changed my life! and the way i view the world, time, space, other dimensions.....existence, etc.

I LOVE THEM!

I reread these periodically. I loved them passionately when I was small, and I still do.

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

I do not even remember the first time I read A Wrinkle in Time, but years after that first reading, I found a copy in a used bookstore and fell in love all over again. Today I own the box set as well as a few other books by L'Engle and recommend them to people at every opportunity. I was very sad when L'Engle died, for the world lost a literary genius with incredible talent and vision. Don't let the placement of these books in the children's section fool you...children and adults alike can benefit from reading the entire quartet.
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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.

I really enjoyed A Wrinkle in Time when I was a kid. On rereading, I discovered that I had definitely forgotten the way Christian symbols and metaphors kind of beat you over the head in this book. It and A Wind in the Door (which, like the other three books in this omnibus, I had never read before), could definitely benefit from some subtlety. Both books are fun, but also frustrating.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet really made up for this, though. The symbolism and overarching themes are balanced by an awesome story. I love the way the time travel elements are used, and the common threads among the generations Charles Wallace visits and their ties to mythology are handled really well. I also felt like the message of " 'gifted' people are a completely separate species from the rest of humanity and will never be accepted by 'normal' people" was tempered in this story.

When I started reading Many Waters, I had a real "what the hell" reaction when I realized what the primary story was going to be about. But I really enjoyed it. The twins are fun characters and more accessible than Meg and Charles Wallace ever are, to me at least. Her treatments of the seraphim and the nephilim really appealed to me, and I thought she dealt well with issues of puberty and sexuality here.

Overall, I really enjoyed the second two books and I really liked seeing the development of writing style and themes over the course of many books and much time.

Timeless

I have read this quartet more times than I can remember. It is indeed timeless in the issues it addresses. The beauty of L’Engle’s writing pulls at my heart & makes me one with her story. It gives me hope as we enter 2024 with all the chaos & violence surrounding us.

Another series I loved reading as a young child. I think it will continue to be an interest to future generations of children, even if it has to be on a tablet device for them to even consider looking at it lol

I love the whole darn series (okay, so I haven't read Many Waters yet - I confess). But the first three are fantastic reads. I also confess that I love people who weave a tale with an alterior motive that I agree with. Yes, I understand why it comforts me, but I don't care - it's still an awesome book!!! I even wanted to name my kittens Fortinbras and Ananda (although my husband won that name battle, *sigh*).

Many Waters was quite good considering how difficult it must have been to write. Maybe it wasn't difficult to write for L'Engle, to be fair, but I found myself constantly thinking about how hard it would have been to try and avoid any claim of blasphemy. I found myself wanting more from it, but again, due to the nature of the story, it's difficult to expect more when a standard has already been set. I still think my favorite book out of the four was A Swiftly Tilting Planet, but I enjoyed rereading all of these stories more than I expected to!

Reread Many Waters 1/16/2010 (and many times before)

Reread A Wrinkle in Time 2/13/2010

Reread A Wind in the Door 2/22/2010

Reread A Swiftly Tilting Planet 5/10/2014: I always remembered this as my favorite of Meg and Charles Wallace's stories (though Many Waters was probably my favorite of the Quartet). I also remembered A Wind in the Door as being the "preachiest" one. (Yep, moreso than the one set in a Bible story!) Rereading this now, though… first thoughts were, proudly, "Long before 'Cloud Atlas', there was this!" But as I got closer to the end, certain things started to unnerve me. Perhaps it's all the 'StarTalk' (Neil deGrasse Tyson's) radio I've been listening to, re: time travel and causality and 'Might-Have-Beens'… perhaps it's greater general knowledge of science and the Bible (however rudimentary in both). But I'm a bit unnerved by --

[SPOILER ALERTS STARTING HERE]

-- by the battle between "good" and "evil" coming down to a kind of eugenics. …That's putting it a bit strongly, and distortively. It's not racial so much as Biblical. Keeping the genetic line coming from the correct prehistorical forebear—but doing so by continually re-mixing the same genetic lines and not letting them get tangled in or diluted by the wrong ones. My main problem with that might just be biology; the thought "Erm… but genetic diversity is actually BETTER…"

And yet another of my favorite books, "Sarum: The Novel of England" by Edward Rutherfurd has something vaguely similar going on, and not on the "Cloud Atlas"-ish level of spiritual reincarnation: a more theoretically grounded theme of determinism —even though that's also a religious term… blargh. But the observable trend, even in shorter time spans, of the actions and fortunes of one generation tangibly impacting the next, behaviorally if nothing else. Not to say genetics DON'T have much to do with individual personalities/behavior/"fate", they certainly do, but maybe not as simply—and hopefully without the "good/evil" judgment call. (Maybe my taste has just moved further away from parable.)

Bottom line: I still love the book, and appreciate the influence it's had on me, and think it's wonderful, but wonder if certain aspects of it would be the same had it been written later in time (since 1978). Possibly separately: I'd also be interested to see a story (a longer novel, obv., written for adults not kids) with the same premise but certain differences for more subtlety: i.e. more mixed identification (Charles Wallace wouldn't only jump Within other white male characters, maybe some non-white and/or female char.s too), a more Dr. Tyson-consistent model of causality (all SORTS of changes to any timeline will have consequences, and in inverted dynamic: small changes would result in huge differences, not just a huge change to cause one discrete difference), and maybe a different judgment call on lines of heritage (crossing and recrossing the same genetic lines might not be a great thing—or it could be kinds of teaching/temperament/values, which I suppose it kind of is, but not solely linked to genetics?)

Maybe I just see the cultural imperatives at play here more clearly than I did before, even without certain obvious buzzwords.

And of course I always appreciate that all these adult issues have adequate room in a children's book.