A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L’Engle
A children’s classic, A Wrinkle in Time is the brave journey of Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin as they fold time and space to save Meg and Charles Wallace’s father from IT, which is the darkness, a plague consuming the galaxy, also known as communism. With the help of fantastical creatures from other planets the children use their own individual talents to confront IT and emerge, not unscathed, but made stronger by the experience.
Should you read it?
6/10 or 8/10
I wish I could say more, but there’s not much to tell. It’s a children’s novel, so the plot moves ridiculously quickly, and the characters are not deep. None of this is bad – it is meant for a specific audience and adults are not that audience. That said, it’s interesting to read it now and see how the culture of the time influenced it and how it fits within science fiction. The latter is especially interesting because it reads like a soft sci-fi (the centauresque Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit as a former star, evil brains…), but then you start thinking about the tesseract, fourth- and fifth-dimensional movement, and it becomes a radically different book. It’s kind of hard-scifi-light: some hard science chopped into easy-to-digest pieces and mixed with entertaining soft sci-fi fluff. If you’ve got kids and you want to introduce them to sci-fi, this is a great book to do so. It’s also a good book to introduce kids to the idea that Soviet Russia was a terrible place. Just don’t expect to get a lot out of it if you’re reading it for the first time as an adult.
Should you reread it?
8/10 or 6/10
I read this book maybe in first grade. It was so long ago I honestly can’t remember. Either way, it was an easy read that still entertained me, if only because of the nostalgia. Now that I know how to analyze literature, I enjoyed finding the things I never saw before, and thinking about what I knew then. If you grew up on the book, it’s definitely a good re-read. If you’re reading it for the first time as an adult, though, I doubt you’ll get anything more out of it by reading it again.
Additional Thoughts
This really is a classic novel in sci-fi canon. If nothing else, it deserves recognition as one of the pioneers of the genre for young readers. The way it handles and explains space-folding as FTL travel is, I think, unmatched anywhere else.
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