BUY THE

Any fantasy book that can get a hopelessly science-hating junior higher (as I was) to both understand and be interested in tesseracts should get an award. And yes, A Wrinkle in Time did that for me as a child. Of course, it didn’t get me so interested in science that I took more than the one required science class in college, or ended up in a major outside of English. But I think this book (and the others in the series) helped me to see how the concepts from science could help create a powerful story. It showed me how relative size is and to see our world in a different light.

More than that, of course, this is just a good story, and just as good a one today as it was forty years ago when it first won the Newbery Medal (of course it didn’t win just for me—I’ll confess I wasn’t around quite yet at the time).

Anyway, to the story: A Wrinkle in Time is about Meg Murry, a shy teenager who’s the daughter of two brilliant scientists, and what happened to her and her family on—you guessed it—a dark and stormy night (a couple, actually). A stranger (Mrs. Whatsit) comes unexpectedly to her house talking about tesseracts (a concept in science not unlike “beaming up” in Star Trek, though it's explained more accurately in the book as being a wrinkle in time). From that unlikely beginning Meg, her brother, and a friend get whirled away into an adventure involving strange places and difficult challenges.

This children’s science fiction series (commonly called the Time Trilogy though there are arguably four) is a good, easy, multi-leveled read that’s definitely worth reading no matter how old you are. It ranks up there with The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Chronicles of Narnia in my estimation.

Interested in Madeleine L'Engle? Check out Deborah's review of her book Sold into Egypt.