A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

A Newberry Award Medal Winner

There are too many books that I would probably have loved as a kid or teenager, but didn’t know about, couldn’t finish, or just didn’t bother to start. One of these books is A Wrinkle in Time. It has so many things that I should have loved as a youngster: science fiction, positive moral messages (without being preachy), misfit kids, and ethereal beings from other planets. I remember starting to read it, but I don’t know how old I was, and I didn’t finish. Oh, the great things I missed in my undisciplined youth!

In A Wrinkle in Time Meg Murry and her young, genius brother Charles Wallace, along with another boy named Calvin are dragged off by Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which, mysterious beings of unknown origin with extraordinary abilities. They travel through space and time via tesseract, a sort of wormhole-like shortcut, in search of Meg’s father. They quickly learn that there is more at stake than Mr. Murry’s safety, and that a good fight against an evil force that would have all individualism extinguished is being waged across the universe.

And so, this is not just an adventure story, although it is well-written as such. It is also a story about individual freedom and the freedom to be an individual. “Maybe I don’t like being different, but I don’t want to be like everybody else, either,” Meg says toward the end of the book. She has been struggling against her school authorities and the people in her community who think she should be more like everyone else, and when she faces the enemy in the story, it’s her defense of her differences that allows her to prevail. I like Meg. She comes to the conclusion that “Like and equal are not the same thing at all,” at such a young age.

L’Engle has filled A Wrinkle in Time with many literary and classical references that would certainly have been lost on me as a young reader. The characters refer to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which I’m sure I didn’t read until I was in college, and Mrs. Who, who has trouble expressing herself so she quotes others, repeats lines from writers and speakers I wouldn’t have known until I was all grown up. These quotations and references work with the sociological and mathematical discussions to make this a rather intelligent work. I feel smarter just having read it now, and wish I had increased my intellectual sphere by finishing it and then rereading it several times in my pre-adult life.


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