A Wrinkle in Time

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It was a dark and stormy night; Meg Murry, her small brother Charles Wallace, and her mother had come down to the kitchen for a midnight snack when they were upset by the arrival of a most disturbing stranger."Wild nights are my glory," the unearthly stranger told them. "I just got caught in a downdraft and blown off course. Let me sit down for a moment, and then I'll be on my way. Speaking of ways, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract."A tesseract (in case the reader doesn't know) is a wrinkle in time. To tell more would rob the reader of the enjoyment of Miss L'Engle's unusual book. A Wrinkle in Time, winner of the Newbery Medal in 1963, is the story of the adventures in space and time of Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin O'Keefe (athlete, student, and one of the most popular boys in high school). They are in search of Meg's father, a scientist who disappeared while engaged in secret work for the government on the tesseract problem.

Features:

ISBN13: 9780312367541
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product details:

Item number (ASIN): 0312367546
Author: Madeleine L'Engle
ISBN: 0312367546
Manufacturer: Square Fish
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Package Dimensions: 60 x 510 x 760 (hundredths-inches)
Package Quantity: 1
Publication Date: May 1, 2007
Publisher: Square Fish
Reading Level: Ages 9-12
Release Date: May 1, 2007
Binding: Paperback

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Amazon.com customer reviews:

Average Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars

Rating:

- A book about real people trapped in an unreal world
I had to five-star this book because when I read it as a kid, about 11 or 12 years old, I was mesmerized by it. I could not put it down and it swiftly became one of my best-loved books of all time. The heroine, Meg Murry, is not pretty or popular and also doesn't consider herself smart, although the author both shows and tells us that Meg is clearly smarter than anyone, including Meg herself, thinks. Meg is also portrayed as a math whiz, which was very unusual for a young female character in the 70s when I read the book. Unfortunately, Meg's belittling of her own social and academic skills, compared to her brothers (two of whom are popular and the third of whom is a very young child genius) and her smart male friend Calvin O'Keefe, rings very true. There are also other strong female characters in the story. Meg's mother is a scientist who is raising the family on her own following the sudden disappearance of Meg's father. Her encouragement of Meg casts a hopeful note at the start of the story. Then Meg along with other strong female characters (the witches, Aunt Beast) helps save the day and rescue her father who is being held prisoner on a faraway planet. Again, Meg is an unusually strong female character; she doesn't sit around waiting for Calvin or her father to come and rescue her when she's in trouble, instead she takes action and does something. For all these reasons, Meg was an incredibly appealing lead character to me as a child, especially since I, like Meg, was female, good at math, independent, and also felt geeky and unattractive. The mathematical concepts in this book, such as dimensions and time travel, are presented in a way that a young reader can understand and find very interesting, without disturbing the flow of the story at all. Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, I couldn't get into the rest of L'Engle's books about the Murrys. I tried very hard to read "Wind in the Door" several times as a child, and as an adult made another stab at "Wind" and "Many Waters", but found those books to be getting a little heavy into the fantasy and allegorical elements for my taste. Even as an adult, I don't care for fantasy novels, and some of the religious overtones in the later works also bother me. "Wrinkle," however, seems to read less like a fantasy tale and more like a straight-ahead sci-fi adventure yarn, like an old episode of "Twilight Zone" with a happy ending. I have read this book many times and give it my highest recommendation.

Rating:

- Will inspire young readers
I can't even fathom why ANYONE would give this book a bad review. Some even said that it was "not believable". IT'S FICTION!!! I read this book when I was a little girl (I'm 40 now).. and it inspired me to believe that you can't limit yourself.. nomatter who you are or what your situation is. This is a wonderful little story about a brave little girl who goes on a huge adventure and learns about things she never thought possible. That's all it is. It doesn't have to mean anything!! It's a story meant to spark a child's imagination. Remember when you used to have an imagination?! Someone even said it was plagerized from some other book. Who cares? I'd rather see my child be interested in something like this than some of the other trashy BS out there. Why does something always have to mean something to these moronic parents? Stop letting your child be told what his/her imagination SHOULD contain and let them decide what they want it to contain. We need free thinkers. if you want your child to be a free thinker..let them read this simple little beautiful story and don't worry about the idiots who want to shove the kool aid down the throats and pollute the minds of their socialist little pigs who'll grow up to tell you what doctor, bank, car, water, food, and home should be. Let your kid to decide what they want to read/be. All it is..IS a very good book!

Rating:

- Rambling, Vague and Uninteresting
My wife is a sixth-grade teacher and has taught this book for many years. She'd told me that I'd like it and so finally my daughter and I read it at the same time as part of a class project. I found it to be rambling and vague at its worst and uninteresting at its best. Intellectually, I understand its appeal and educational value. I thought my daughter might connect with the main character, Meg, but there was nothing there for her. I do, however, understand why Meg would be a draw for some children. For the purposes of an educational exercise, the book is full of symbolism and solid characterization. For adults, it's a quick read, but start with tempered expectations.

Rating:

- Mostly Brilliant Book, but an unconscious metaphor for lousy parents
As a story, I found this book fascinating. I hadn't read it in over 25 years, and forgot how gripping it was. (It actually scared me as a kid, though I didn't know why.) I give Madeleine L'Engle a lot of credit---her creativity is boundless. Her characters are powerful, her leaps of fancy and time and plot are superior, and she takes what could so easily be a cheesy and unworkable story and makes it work. Kudos to her. My only criticism with the story itself came at the end, when Meg returns to rescue Charles Wallace from IT. I don't want to kill the plot by revealing details, so I'll keep this general, but I felt L'Engle handled this quite ineffectively. The rescue was simplistic and inconsequential compared with the power of the rest of the story. It was like she used a little device to solve the plot, whereas the whole rest of the story distinctly avoided devices. I found this quite unsatisfying, even annoying. Again, without going into detail, the words that Meg used to rescue Charles Wallace had actually been implicit in her behavior throughout the whole story. Thus, L'Engle's implication at the end is that words count more than behavior. And I couldn't agree with this less. That's why I found the book's climax moment distasteful. (Oh, and I also found L'Engle's little religious pro-Jesus lines icky and unnecessary.) But the deeper point of my review is about the metaphorical content of this book---L'Engle's UNCONSCIOUS intention for writing the story. In the story parents---Meg's parents, at least (not Calvin's)---are consistently idealized. I felt that at some level this was L'Engle expressing her idealization of one or both of her own parents, or at least expressing her split-off, dissociative need to idealize parents---or perhaps even herself as a parent. (I just read that she had three children of her own---plus an adopted one---and also that relatives noted that she was in denial of her father's alcoholism. And I wonder what else she was in denial of.) Meg's parents are presented as perfect, and "The Black Thing" and the vicious, authoritarian, all-knowing "IT" are presented as the complete antithesis to perfection---as evil incarnate. My sense is that these evils represent the evil L'Engle could not face in her own parents, and thus in her own self as a parent. And the think part of the reason this book has been so popular---and so lauded by teachers in schools---is that most people, psychologically, are not really that different from L'Engle. They idealize their parents and themselves as parents to one degree or other, and they deny their own split-off, sick, traumatized, broken, damaged, abusive, conforming (aka EVIL) sides. How much easier as a storyteller to take that denied side and place it on another planet, in another galaxy so far away, in another being. And also, how convenient to view this EVIL force as having captured and encased the perfect, idealized father that the little child dreams of having... And also, what a perfect fantasy for the little child (Meg, aka L'Engle herself) to have the power to come along, with magic powers, and rescue her perfect father from the grip of the evil forces (aka his sick, wounded behavior, such as...his alcoholism). It's an age-old lie that so many people tell themselves over and over again: that the child's only hope is to be there for his or her parents, to rescue them and make them perfect, and in so doing, to finally get fully loved by them. Utter fantasy. It never happens. It can't.

Rating:

- A Classic
I read this book first as a child, and then throughout my lifetime of 57 years. This is my all-time favorite book in the world. More young women should read this book, to realize that being out of step with one's peers isn't necessarily a bad thing. L'Engle gave me a view of a real girl, back when other authors weren't as liberated.