A Wrinkle in Time Book Review: The Children's Book That Terrified Me

Rating: ★★★★★

"A Wrinkle in Time" Book Review:

A Wrinkle in Time is one of those books that gets classified as a children's novel because the protagonists are children, but Madeleine L'Engle was writing about the nature of evil, the structure of the universe, and the terrifying power of conformity, and she wasn't simplifying any of it.

Meg Murry is thirteen, angry, brilliant at math, and terrible at fitting in. Her father, a physicist, has been missing for over a year. Her mother — also a scientist, also beautiful, which Meg resents because she didn't inherit it — is holding the family together with quiet desperation. Her little brother Charles Wallace is five years old and may be the most intelligent person on the planet. When three strange women — Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which — arrive and reveal that they know where Mr. Murry is, Meg, Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O'Keefe are launched across the universe via tesseract, a wrinkle in the fabric of space-time.

L'Engle's universe is genuinely strange. The planet Uriel, where centaur-like creatures sing in harmonies that are physically beautiful. The two-dimensional planet Camazotz, where IT — a giant disembodied brain — controls every person, every movement, every thought. The scene where Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin arrive on Camazotz and watch children bouncing balls in perfect synchronization in front of identical houses is one of the most chilling images in all of children's literature. It's not the monster that's scary. It's the sameness.

Charles Wallace's possession by IT — his mind absorbed into the collective, his face going blank and his voice going cold — is L'Engle's darkest stroke. She understood that the loss of individuality is more frightening than any physical threat, and she wrote it for ten-year-olds without blinking.

And the resolution. Meg saves Charles Wallace not with cleverness or strength or a weapon, but with love. Specifically, with the stubborn, imperfect, angry love of a sister who refuses to give up on her brother. L'Engle makes this feel earned rather than sentimental, because Meg's love has never been clean or easy — it's tangled up with jealousy and frustration and fear — and that's exactly why IT can't replicate it.

Hope Davis narrates the audiobook with clarity and emotional precision, letting L'Engle's language do the work.

Five stars. The book that taught me that children's literature doesn't have to protect children from real ideas.

If You Liked A Wrinkle in Time, Try:

• The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster — Another children's novel that's secretly a philosophical text disguised as an adventure. Different tone, same intellectual ambition.

• The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman — Another child traveling across worlds to rescue a parent, with even higher stakes and darker implications. A natural next step.

• Coraline by Neil Gaiman — A child confronting a perfect but wrong version of her world. Same understanding that conformity is the real monster.

From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf

If you enjoyed this book review, check out How to Win a Million Dollars — a story about someone who also had to cross impossible distances to bring back the person they loved, sharing A Wrinkle in Time's understanding that the most powerful force in any universe is the stubborn refusal to let go.

Learn More: How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter

How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter by Luke Stoffel