Editors Reads Verdict
L'Engle's Newbery Medal winner is one of the most audacious children's books ever written — a deeply weird fusion of quantum physics, Christian mysticism, and adventure that refuses to condescend to its readers. Its influence on a generation of writers and readers is incalculable.
What We Loved
- Intellectually ambitious in ways that children's fiction rarely attempts
- Meg's ordinariness — her struggles with school and self-doubt — makes her deeply relatable
- The cosmic scale is genuinely awe-inspiring
- The climax resolves through love rather than violence
Minor Drawbacks
- The Christian allegory may feel heavy-handed to some readers
- Some of the science fiction concepts are dated
- Charles Wallace can feel too precociously wise to be believable
Key Takeaways
- → Love is not a feeling but an active force that can overcome darkness
- → Being different, even when it feels like a disability, may be a gift
- → Evil is conformity taken to its logical extreme
- → Science and spirituality can coexist in a single vision
- → A child's love is as powerful as any adult's
| Author | Madeleine L'Engle |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Square Fish |
| Pages | 256 |
| Published | January 1, 1962 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Young Adult, Science Fiction, Fantasy |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Young readers and nostalgic adults; anyone interested in the history of children's literature. |
The Child Who Was Rejected
Before “A Wrinkle in Time” became a beloved classic, it was rejected by more than two dozen publishers who didn’t know what to do with it. Too adult for children, too childlike for adults, too religious for secular publishers, too scientific for religious ones. L’Engle persisted, and the novel was eventually published in 1962, won the Newbery Medal, and went on to become one of the most beloved children’s books in the American canon. The things that confused publishers are exactly what make it extraordinary.
Meg Murry
At the center of the cosmic adventure is Meg Murry, a thirteen-year-old girl who is neither brilliant like her younger brother nor athletic nor socially confident. She is bad at school, gets into fights, and is defined by her relationship to her absent father and her own inadequacy. L’Engle’s revolutionary choice was to make her protagonist ordinary — struggling, resentful, imperfect — and then show that these qualities are precisely what the universe needs. Meg’s weapons against the great darkness are not genius or strength but stubbornness and love.
The Tesseract and Beyond
L’Engle takes the concept of the tesseract — a four-dimensional hypercube — and uses it as the mechanism for space-time travel, wrapping her adventure in genuine scientific concepts rather than arbitrary magic. The planets the children visit, particularly the terrifying Camazotz where individualism has been abolished by conformity, are simultaneously science-fictional and allegorical. Camazotz is what happens when a society achieves perfect efficiency by eliminating everything that makes individuals different from each other.
The Climax of Love
The resolution — in which Meg defeats the novel’s great antagonist not through cleverness or violence but through pure love — was considered by many publishers to be an unsatisfying ending. L’Engle considered it the whole point. The novel argues that love is not a sentiment but an ontological force, and its climax attempts to dramatize this with complete sincerity.
Our rating: 4.2/5 — One of children’s literature’s most audacious and enduring visions, a cosmic adventure that trusts its young readers completely.
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