A Wrinkle in Time

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, 1962 Farrar, Straus & Giroux

     Margaret Murry is known as Meg by her family. Though she is brilliant at math, Meg is the average one in a family of geniuses: her ten-year-old twin brothers Sandy and Dennys are brilliant with sports and most things mechanical; the youngest brother, Charles Wallace, only began speaking at four years old (though he began speaking in complete sentences with an extensive vocabulary immediately) and at five he has an uncanny ability to telepathically read others' thoughts and emotions; her mother is a beauty and a microbiologist working with scientific concepts Meg cannot seem to grasp, but that Charles Wallace easily explains; Meg's father is a physicist working with the government on a project called a tesseract. At thirteen Meg constantly compares herself to her brilliant and beautiful mother and the comparison leads to feelings of inferiority. When Meg meets Calvin O'Keefe, a fourteen-year-old high school junior, and the two begin to develop a deep and lasting relationship.
     When Meg's father goes missing, she has hope that he'll return, but the fear that he has left the family intentionally wreaks havoc on her emotional stability. One day, during a storm Mrs. Whatsit comes to the Murry home and Charles Wallace announces it time to go on a quest in search of their father. The children go out into the nearby woodland, meet Calvin, and encounter Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Which. The three women are angelic beings with vast knowledge of the Black Thing who help Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin in their search for Mr. Murry.
     The Mrs. "W"s use the tesseract to move the three children through space from earth to Uriel, a planet filled with centaur-like creatures who live in a state of light and love. It is there that the three children are first hear about the Black Thing and its mission to take over the Universe. They next travel by tesseract to the land of the "Happy Medium", she looks into her crystal ball and shows the fight against the Dark Thing on earth, how figures throughout history have fought against it, and how the tide may turn.
     The next stop is the planet Comazotz, a planet dominated by the Black Thing. The people are robotic and controlled by a hive-mind called "IT". When the children encounter the embodiment of IT, it convinces Charles Wallace to look into his eyes and become a vessel for the creature. He then leads his sister and her friend to the place where Mr. Murry is held captive, then to the place where IT was centralized. The concentrated power of Comazotz's telepathic ruler nearly takes over Meg and Calvin as it had Charles Wallace, but Mr. Murry is able to transport the children from Comazotz in time.
     Unfortunately, Mr. Murry doesn't know how to protect the children as they travel through the Black Thing and Meg nearly dies. When they arrive in Ixchel, a neighboring planet, the local population helps to save and heal her. The trio of Ws appears and task Meg with rescuing her brother from the Black Thing. When Meg, Calvin, Charles Wallace, and Mr. Murry return home things are forever changed.
     When A Wrinkle in Time first went to publishers, many editors were hesitant about publishing a book that so obviously dealt with issues of good and evil, with a significant emphasis on religion. While a younger readership might skim over the blatant Christianity, older readers catch the allusions beyond L'Engle's text. The story is captivating and gives a more liberal take on the traditional Christian discourse. A good aged audience is twelve years or older.