"A Wrinkle In Time" by Madeleine L'Engle (published 1962)

Newbery Award winning classic children’s story, “A Wrinkle In Time” (1962), by Madeleine L’Engle, is a delightful science fiction and fantasy tale incorporating very real scientific concepts such as a *tesseract* (geometry: the generalization of a cube to four dimensions). To *tesser* means to travel beyond the rules of time and space, which is exactly what Meg, her brother Charles Wallace, her father, a friend named Calvin, and three old women (Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which), do to save one another from being incorporated into a dark planet far from home called Camazotz. 

“A Wrinkle In Time” is not quite *hard* sci-fi (concerned by actual scientific accuracy), nor is it necessarily dystopian, although it steers close to both. L’Engle sprinkles a good amount of fantasy elements (such as Charles Wallace’s powers of intelligence and the angelic-like qualities of Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which), offering a brilliant escape from the mundane into a world both frightening and miraculous. And the world-building elements in “A Wrinkle In Time” explore a multi-layered universe in which no planet is the same, and where it is a great difficulty for the characters to explain certain phenomena (a dark shadow of seemingly negative space, the transformation of a human to a beautiful beast, the sensation of being in a 2-dimensional world… it goes on). So instead of hearing the children’s explanations, the raw emotional experience is shared with the reader through L’Engle’s use of the third person point of view. Readers become observers; witnesses. For some, not everything will be graspable, but that’s OK – for just a second it may make sense, and that’s all that is needed to enjoy the story, just as the characters do within the pages.

With all these crazy and sometimes silly components, there is humor to be found in the book as well. Mrs. Who, for instance, continuously quotes famous passages from classic texts. She doesn’t forget to tell us by whom these quotes were written or said, and she always quotes in the original language first. Seneca, Pascal, Euripides, etc. The fun starts when these passages sync up in unexpected and thoughtful ways with the plot…

The story begins with Meg, her brother Charles Wallace, and their mother (a scientist), missing their father (their mother’s husband, a scientist too) terribly. One night there is a heavy storm, and awakened, the three each go to the kitchen, not expecting to find one another there. But when they do, the warmth and comfort they gain from one another is shaken up by an unexpected visitor… and there beings an adventure of bravery, love, friendship, and family. “A Wrinkle In Time” is the first book in the Time Quintet Series by Madeleine L’Engle.