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A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Margaret Murry or Meg as she’s called, is quite an awkward young girl who’s not popular in school. She wears glasses and has braces, the typical description for girls who are unpopular. Nobody understands her in school, not even her teachers. She also doesn’t do well in lessons but in reality, she’s extremely brilliant at Math! It’s because she finds the teaching methods in school too different from what her father used to teach her.

Her father has been missing for quite a long time. People gossiped that he’s probably run away with another woman. He used to write to the family but stopped after a while. Meg’s mother still continues to write letters to him but they go unanswered and this has caused more unkind stories to be spread about the Murry family.

Meg has 3 younger brothers, 10-year-old Sandy and Dennys are twins while five-year-old Charles Wallace is the youngest. Meg is closest to Charles Wallace and usually turns to him for comfort after having a bad day. He also seems to know what she’s thinking, making Meg feel that he can actually read her mind. Besides Meg, Charles Wallace also always knows what their mother is thinking and feeling.

One day, Charles gets Meg to go with him to a supposedly haunted house to meet three strange women with strange names: Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which. They reveal that they are there to help Meg and Charles find their father who is in grave danger. Another boy, Calvin joins them too. He is considered to be of the same kind as Charles Wallace so he’s accepted by the three women to take part in their journey.

After that, they travel to another planet that’s very, very, very far away from Earth and they discover something sinister called IT. IT has captured their father and they have to save him. IT is evil. IT wants everybody to act like robots and unable to think for themselves. IT is in favour of uniformity. IT is also just a brain. I have no idea why IT was represented in the form of a brain though. The only way to handle IT is to try to resist what IT wants them to do.

One of my favourite parts in this book is Meg’s and Charles’ encounter with Calvin where Charles interrogated Calvin and Calvin being surprised that Charles wasn’t as dumb as everyone else thought he was. It shows that you can’t truly judge a person unless you got to know them! Actually I find Charles Wallace an absolutely interesting character. Such bombastic words and ideas from a mere five-year-old!

I decided to read A Wrinkle in Time because a lot of other people have already read and loved it. It’s also a banned book so I wanted to find out what could contribute to it being such a book. This story reminds me of something out of a Diana Wynne Jones book. I can’t say that I really liked this book. It wasn’t thoroughly enthralling but still something that we need to read. There are some scientific terms in it and they are explained in simple ways so even science-phobic readers can easily understand how science plays a part in the story.

Other Bloggers’ Reviews: Nymeth, Natasha, Book Dads, Trin, Penny

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This entry was posted on Sunday, October 12th, 2008 at 9:46 pmand is filed under Authors L, Children's Books, Science Fiction, Titles A. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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