A Wrinkle in Time
by Madeleine L'Engle
Summary
Meg Murry, awkward and quick tempered, has spent months worrying about her scientist father, who vanished while researching a way to fold the fabric of space and time itself. One stormy night a strange old woman named Mrs Whatsit turns up at the Murry house and mentions, cryptically, that a tesseract is real, sending Meg, her small genius brother Charles Wallace, and a popular classmate named Calvin O'Keefe off with Mrs Whatsit and her two companions, Mrs Who and Mrs Which, tessering across the universe in search of him. They find Mr Murry a prisoner on the planet Camazotz, where every mind answers to a single pulsing brain called IT, and where Charles Wallace, certain of his own cleverness, lets IT take over his mind while trying to rescue his father. Meg pulls her father free, but the escape leaves Charles Wallace behind under IT's control, and a badly weakened Meg is carried to the gentle, sightless creatures of the planet Ixchel to recover. Sent back to Camazotz alone, because only she carries something IT cannot copy, Meg realizes the one weapon IT has no answer for is her own love for her brother, and by holding onto that love while facing him directly she breaks IT's hold and frees Charles Wallace. The book ends with the whole family reunited in their own backyard, moments after they first vanished.
It reads quickly for how much science it carries, mixing dimensional physics with open religious and moral argument about darkness and conformity, and L'Engle trusts young readers with both without translating either down. Meg's stubbornness and self doubt, rather than any special talent, are what the book insists on as heroic, which is part of why it has stayed so widely loved by kids who do not see themselves as the chosen one in most stories.
Historical Context & Significance
Farrar, Straus and Giroux published A Wrinkle in Time in January 1962 after more than two dozen publishers, twenty six by most later counts, turned the manuscript down, and the American Library Association awarded it the 1963 Newbery Medal over two honor books, Sorche Nic Leodhas's Thistle and Thyme and Olivia Coolidge's Men of Athens. It went on to win the Sequoyah Book Award and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and became the first of five novels in L'Engle's Time Quintet.
Reviews split at the time: Horn Book Magazine called the mix of science, philosophy and religion a confusion that made unusual demands on the imagination, while other critics praised exactly that refusal to talk down to children. The novel has sold more than ten million copies and become one of the most challenged books in American schools, landing on the American Library Association's list of the hundred most frequently challenged books of the 1990s over accusations that it promoted witchcraft, with one Alabama district objecting specifically to a passage naming Jesus alongside artists and philosophers among Earth's defenders. L'Engle called the objections nonsense from people unwilling to read the book. It was filmed twice, as a 2003 television film directed by John Kent Harrison and a 2018 feature directed by Ava DuVernay with Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon.