A Wrinkle in Time

1962, 1973 Dell Yearling edition
Madeleine L'Engle
A Wrinkle in Time
Original price $3.50, purchase price $1.75
Worn paperback
B-

This won the Newbery and its heroine loves math.  It has a theme of love and nonconformity.  It shows a variety of aliens, from cuddly Aunt Beast to horrifying IT (as in "it," not "Information Technology").  And the book irritates the heck out of me.

I think as a child I respected the story as a "modern classic" and liked aspects of it, but I always preferred the third book in the series, A Swiftly Tilting Planet.  I read the books mostly for Meg, the bespectacled misfit I somewhat identified with.  (Although I was a much better student than she was, and my rebellion took a quieter form.)  And since I wasn't yet aware of what a cliche "You're beautiful when you take your glasses off" was, I was touched by Calvin's interest in her.  Now that, and his immediate love of her family, feels rushed and unmerited, at least at this point in the series.

The book is very frustrating, because of its mixture of good and bad.  Perhaps I should've been warned by the opening sentence, "It was a dark and stormy night."  You think that L'Engle is parodying cliches, and then you realize that she's embracing them.  Calvin seems like a believable teenager, and then he says, "Jeepers."

Also, the Christianity is heavy-handed, as in Charles Wallace's "Oh, duh, Jesus of course" moment.  In Little Women, the girls' religion is integral to their lives, like them being New Englanders.  Here it feels forced.  Also, the message of light vs. dark is bungled when the sightless beasts wonder if the humans are from a "dark planet," even though later Aunt Beast can't understand the concepts of light and dark.  L'Engle should've chosen another symbol, at least for that planet.

All that said, the book keeps almost working.  It just doesn't hold up as well as Island of the Blue Dolphins, a less ambitious story.