A Wrinkle in Time

One of my all-time favorite books!

I enjoyed this, but would have liked it better if I had read it as a young adult. I just couldn't empathize with the characters. I'll be interested what my children think when they read it in a couple of years. Maybe I'll gain a new appreciation through them.

The science fiction nerd I became owes so much to this book. Philosophical implications of physics tweaks, strong awkward heroine who finds comfort in math, political analogies, and fantastical but completely believable worlds. Young adult or not, this is everything science fiction should strive to be

Lovely book.

Definitely a child's book with little to offer for adults. Cannot understand why this would be on the Top 100 SciFi books of all time.

This was the book that really changed things for me as a young reader and introduced a whole new world and genre. I love it. The story and the emotions are strong and engaging. Madeleine L'Engle is a favorite.

Another reading: I am not going to write about this one formally. My 3rd-grade teacher read this one out loud to us. He read us many books, but I remember this one particularly. My son is in 3rd grade this year, so I thought I would read it to my kids. It did not grab my kids' attention. And when it came to meeting IT, my daughter did not want to continue reading. She does not like scary things, so I respected her decision and stopped reading. I probably would have tried again if it had been a book they were more engaged in. But I think they were tolerating more than enjoying the book.

I went ahead and finished the book to see if I thought I should try to get them back into it but I just didn't think it was necessary so I did not.

The other part is that my 3rd grader came home with Harry Potter 4, which his teacher gave him to read. He was excited about reading that. So we picked that up. I will write about that separately, but again, there are scary passages and my daughter again did not like them. But she was engaged in the book, so when she was too scared, we stopped. And because I had read the book multiple times I only read the passages that would be scary in the middle of the day. (I have lived through being woken up over nightmares.)

So there are ways to try to move forward if kids do not like scary. But as much as I generally like L'Engle, I do find it odd that I am not really that much of a fan of her most well known books.
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Short review: I found the audiobooks (with Madeline L'Engle reading) in our library. It has been well over 20 years since I have read them, but I thought some older fiction was what my brain needed.

This is a beloved book, but it has always been my least favorite of the three. I enjoyed it, but it seemed much shorter, and the ‘action' sequences were much shorter than I remembered. When I read it before, I had not read 1984. But the comparison and contrasting ideas are unmistakable. L'Engle can see a way to win over Totalitarianism because of her belief in Love. I look forward to reading books 4 and 5 since I have never read those. But first on to Wind in the Door.

My longer review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/wrinkle/

My dad read this to me when I was a child and he recently told me that I declared the ending “corny.” I have to give little girl me some credit there because the end of the book did make me groan a little bit. Still, I really enjoyed reading the book and looked forward to reading it before I fell asleep each night. Some nights I stayed up later than I wanted to read a few extra pages.
I think L'Engle's interesting characters are what make this book so good. I especially love Charles Wallace, with all his weirdness. To me, his precociousness should make him entirely annoying, but he's written so endearingly that it's hard to be irritated. I also love the science in the book and the fact that L'Engle explained the idea behind the time travel. It made me really want to do some research on it and see what I could find. If that doesn't make a book great, I don't know what does.

Loved it when I was a kid, love it now. It mentioned God, which was a little off-putting, but it IS a fantasy book so I'll let it slide.

Loved this book as a child, and it turns out that as an adult it impresses me even more. It's beautifully written and deals well with some pretty mature themes.

How many times have I read this book? Ten? Fifteen? I know only that much of the book I already knew by heart.

Meg is a classic gifted kid, brilliant in certain areas, but without a clue as to how to fit in among regular kids. Her little brother, Charles Wallace, is even more precocious. Meg and Charles meet up with three mysterious creatures, Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Who, and befriend a boy as gifted as they are who has learned to get along, Calvin. Together, they go off in search of Meg and Charles' father and, in the process, have to find a way to fight the Black Thing and IT.

This was the first book I remember wanting to read over and over again when I was a little girl. The sequels somehow didn't satisfy, but I did reread Wrinkle in Time many times.

I read this as a kid and absolutely loved it. Rereading it as an adult, well, it's still a fun read. But it feels a lot like Narnia meets 1984. Narnia in the fact that the main characters are all pretty useless and don't really advance the plot or solve any of their own problems. 1984 for reasons that will become pretty obvious reading this as an adult. The plot is fun yet surprisingly dark for a children's book, and there are some neat ideas. But also every NON-EVIL creature in the universe is a practicing Christian.

Like so many children's books, the characters are the weakest part. The main character Meg is pretty crap and it's mentioned several times that her FLAWS are her STRENGTH. And boy is she strong. She spends like 25% of the book complaining about blaming everyone for things they couldn't have prevented and yada yada yada I guess it's a plot point, but she's not sympathetic in the least.

As a kid, I thought the boy-wonder prodigy character Charles Wallace was precocious and annoying, but he's definitely the best part of the first half of the book. He's smart and knows it and is oddly wise, and then all of this gets thrown in his face when he underestimates the enemy. It's a pretty good arc.

In the end, LOVE SAVES THE DAY. What an overused trope. Meg loves her brother SO HARD that the evil brain creature just can't understand it, and then an alien teleports her to safety, and everyone rejoices and even the dog comes in for a hug!!!!! Wow!!!!! So sweet!!!!!!!!!