Hello! I should really have started writing these earlier in the year, but since I obsess so much over them, tend to put it off.
And here is another thing I put off – reading this book. It has been on my list for YEARS, but I never got around to it until this year.
Originally published in 1962, A Wrinkle in Time is the story of Meg and Charles Wallace Murry, and their friend Calvin O’Keefe. The story is pretty simple: the Murry kids’ father is a scientist, and while working on the mysterious “tesseract”, he disappears. Meg and her brother Charles Wallace are pulled (by their mysterious neighbor Mrs. Whatsit) into a plan to rescue him.
They travel through space to a distant planet and fight an evil being by the name of “The Black Thing”, the source of all evil. The story is pretty exciting, and I imagine for young children it would be even more so. Though I found some of the “immortal” characters a little silly, it didn’t mar my enjoyment. (Besides, this wasn’t written for old bags like me.)
Honestly, though, I felt that the storyline is really secondary to the characters and their development. Meg is 13 or so – awkward, smart (especially in math), but not as smart as her genius brother Charles Wallace, a 5-year old prodigy. She has a smart mouth, is unpopular , strong and fiercely loyal. You find strong female characters like her in modern YA fiction: Lyra Belacqua, Katniss Everdeen, etc – but I imagine Meg Murry was the first. And she is awesome. Charles Wallace, as I said, is a genius who can talk to Meg through telepathy. Calvin is the BMOC, but we find that he also considers himself an outcast.
A Wrinkle in Time is a classic for a reason. Read it, and get your kids to read it.
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