A Wrinkle in Time

My first copy of this book was the 1971 Puffin. I would have been about 10 or 11. I think as a young reader I was looking for escapism, and this book delivers it. It has everything I could relate to: a family setting, boys and girls, younger and old protagonists. And what happens to them? Space travel, meeting witches, an epic battle between good and evil, and an authoritarian dystopian planet. It's a hell of a mash up, but somehow it works beautifully.

I later read that Madeleine L'Engle was an Episcopalian (I think that means American Anglican). You can certainly see the religious influence on her book, but she got in trouble because when the characters list the historical warriors of light against darkness, they name Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and Marie Curie alongside the perfunctory Jesus. That's a banning, or maybe a paddling, to quote The Simpsons.

I now have the 50th anniversary edition on my e-reader. The image here on Bookwyrm/ramblingreaders I believe is a 1983 hardcover edition, which I'm not keen on. I also had a T-shirt based on the 1962 first edition dustjacket illustration, which has a nice mid-century modern design.

I read the sequels and saw the movie, they somehow lacked the spark I always get from this lovely little book.

I think I see why this is such an important book to many of my friends, but I didn't get on well with it. Part of the problem is definitely that I'm reading it as an adult and it's clearly intended for a significantly younger audience than the YA novels I've enjoyed over the past few years. But there's other stuff too.

The Meg-Calvin relationship developed without ever developing - like it was just inevitable that these two would have a super gender role normative relationship so there was no need to bother with exposition of it - and felt like it undermined her agency. The weirdly formal tone of most of the dialogue. The simplicity of "evil" in the book, which when its content was explored at all just felt like red scare propaganda, as if 1962 America didn't have its conformist, deindividuated suburbia. The occasional bursts of god-talk in a story that religion doesn't seem to fit into. The way the beloved father figure keeps resorting to authoritarian responses to children who know things he doesn't.

Maybe this just hasn't aged well? Or maybe it's just not a book for me.