A Wrinkle in Time

I never read this as a kid, so I came to it cold as an adult, no nostalgia doing the heavy lifting for me the way it clearly does for a lot of readers. Meg Murry, math genius, awkward, defensive of her weird genius little brother, is a genuinely good character to spend a short book with, and the concept of the tesseract, folding space to travel faster than light, still holds up as a fun bit of hand wavy science even decades later.

The religious framing is heavier than I expected going in. It’s not subtle, the Mrs. W’s are explicitly tied to angelic or divine forces at points, and I understand why some readers find that heavy handed, tying an entire universe’s struggle against evil directly to a Christian cosmology in a way that narrows what could’ve been a more universal good versus evil story. I didn’t mind it as much as some reviews I’ve read, it fits the book’s era and L’Engle was upfront about her own faith shaping the story, but I get the frustration.

My real hesitation is how low stakes the middle stretch feels. Nothing particularly dangerous happens to the kids for a long while, the antagonist, a giant disembodied brain running a planet of forced conformity, is more unsettling as an idea than as an actual threat on the page, and the book wraps up faster than the buildup earns.

Four stars. Short, strange, genuinely inventive for its time, and Meg alone is worth the read even where the plot around her plays it safer than I wanted.