Book Review: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

Despite its popularity in the USA, this book isn't particularly well known (as far as I can tell) over here in the UK, so I never came across it as a child. This is a shame, because I think I would have loved it had I read it as a child. However, I still enjoyed it very much, and I'm glad I've finally got around to reading it.

 

Summary (Goodreads): 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 be on my way. Speaking of way, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract".

Meg's father had been experimenting with this fifth dimension of time travel when he mysteriously disappeared. Now the time has come for Meg, her friend Calvin, and Charles Wallace to rescue him. But can they outwit the forces of evil they will encounter on their heart-stopping journey through space?

 

This is quite a hard book to review, as it's kind of hard to describe why I liked it. I found it a little odd, but mostly in a good way - the sort of quirkiness that makes you want to find out more. For most of the book I had literally no idea what was going to happen next - it seemed like just about anything could happen. It felt very much like the story told in the book was very much scratching the surface of the world it was set in - that there was a lot that wasn't revealed or explained to us. I liked the sense of mystery that this added. Overall, I found it a very interesting story, dealing with themes of Love over Evil; a common theme, but one which I don't think can be over-done.

 

Personally, I didn't find I was particularly interested in most of the characters; probably this was just due to a lack of time spent developing them, which was probably necessarily the case in a book this length, especially as there is a fair amount of plot to get in. (Although I did like that Meg was good at maths, which is a very underrated skill among book heroines.) However, I think the other aspects of the book made up for this. Mostly, it's left me wanting more; so I am looking forward to reading the sequels.

 

(At the time of posting, I've read A Wind in the Door, which I also enjoyed a lot, though not as much as this.)