A Wrinkle in Time

L"Engle, Madeleine. A Wrinkle in Time. 1962. New York: Dell Publishing.

The Murry family is clearly a unique group of people. Mrs. Murry is a very smart lady that has four children; Meg, Charles Wallace, Sandy and Dennys. Her husband has been away on a special assignment for the government which has clearly had an impact on the children. Meg seems to have taken her father's absence particularly hard causing trouble in school and with other children. She is a feisty girl, who seems to resist and push other people away. One dark, stormy night the family couldn't sleep, so they were all sitting in the kitchen eating when a neighbor shows up whose name is Mrs. Whatsit. It turns out that she lives in a nearby house with two other women, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Who. Meg learns that her brother knows these women and that they may have information that will help them find their father. The women, who turn out to be some sort of supernatural spirits have discovered a way to travel through time called tesseracting. They take the children Meg, Charles Wallace, and a local neighborhood kid, Calvin to a planet called Camazotz where all the people have been brainwashed and they must fight the evil IT to save their father. In the end, Meg learns that love is all she needs in order to save her brother from the evil.

This story written by L'Engle was extremely disappointing. The story is somewhat confusing and hard to follow. The way in which the story begins we know that there is something fishy about the three women that live in the nearby haunted house because of their names and their peculiar behavior, but when Charles Wallace takes his sister to the house the reader is somewhat left in the dark. We are getting to see the story through Meg's eyes and since she doesn't know exactly what is happening neither does the reader, and this can be quite frustrating at times. There are great insinuations of good versus evil, supernatural characters, and religion, however I can not see how a fourth grader could possible interpret this book on their own. It is written on a fourth grade level, but the content is clearly intended for an older audience. The story jumps from one unbelievable setting to the next and never really has a climax that will grab the reader's attention. This book has won several awards including the Newberry Award, the Sequoyah Book Award, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and runner up for the Hans Christian Award.

It seems that after I researched the book I could appreciate more of the qualities that the book contained. I can definately see how this book could be used in a classroom, but in my opinion it is not one that I would recommend picking up off the shelf to read for fun.