Buy on Amazon
View on Biblioguides
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle won a Newbery Award for best YA novel of the year in 1963. It is a science fiction novel that has a solid basis of good vs. evil, sacrificial love, love for family, respect for parents, and even a little bit of spiritual depth. It is a powerful story filled with adventure, drama, creativity, and interesting characters. Meg and Charles Wallace Murry, and their new friend Calvin O'Keefe, travel through time and space looking for Meg's father, a physicist who has disappeared while working on a secret project. The three children are guided by what appear to be three celestial beings—Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which. They are good entities and their true nature is revealed later in the story. Two underlying themes of the novel are government thought control vs. freedom of conscience and the power of determined love to defeat evil. A good middle school reader could handle this book, though it has riches in it enough to satisfy the high school or adult reader.
Madeleine L’Engle wrote four sequels to A Wrinkle in Time, forming a connected series. Now, I like sequels as much as anyone, since it is a near-universal sentiment for a reader of a good book to want to know “what happened next.” However, I read two of the four sequels to A Wrinkle in Time, and I was not so thrilled and didn’t read the rest. To my mind, they were lot lower in overall interest than the original with less moral and spiritual depth. I hope you like reading A Wrinkle in Time. If you do, you can make up your own mind about reading the sequels.