A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Originally Published in 1962
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

It was a dark and stormy night; Meg Murry, her small brother Charles Wallace, and her mother had come down to the kitchen for a midnight snack when they were upset by the arrival of a most disturbing stranger.

“Wild nights are my glory,” the unearthly stranger told them. “I just got caught in a downdraft and blown off course. Let me sit down for a moment, and then I’ll be on my way. Speaking of ways, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.”

A tesseract (in case the reader doesn’t know) is a wrinkle in time. To tell more would rob the reader of the enjoyment of Miss L’Engle’s unusual book. A Wrinkle in Time, winner of the Newbery Medal in 1963, is the story of the adventures in space and time of Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin O’Keefe (athlete, student, and one of the most popular boys in high school). They are in search of Meg’s father, a scientist who disappeared while engaged in secret work for the government on the tesseract problem.

I feel funny about reviewing A Wrinkle In Time because everyone but me has probably already read it and has formed their own opinion on it. So instead, I’ll write about what the intergenerational book club my sons’ and I are in did when we discussed the book. My boys are eight and ten years old and both of them really liked the book. My ten year old went on to read the next two books in the quintet. I read most of the book aloud with my eight year old son. I’m glad we did it that way because there were some words he didn’t understand. There were even some words that I didn’t know the definition of!

I was in charge of snacks for our meeting. We try to have snacks that are somehow related to the book. I brought Ruffles potatoes chips because Ruffles have ridges. Ridges = wrinkles! I also brought liverwurst and crackers because the kids in the book eat liverwurst sandwiches. I thought it would be funny to see if any of the kids tried it. My sons didn’t and were disgusted that I brought it in the first place. Another boy tried it and loved it! He ate several slices. His mom and I were both a little queasy watching him eat it.

For an activity, I brought shoestring licorice and Sour Patch Kids. In the book there is an illustration of what it looks like when an ant crosses a wrinkle in time. We made our own wrinkles with the licorice and the Sour Patch Kids crossed over it. And then of course the kids got to eat their project.

The kids in the book club all gave the book a thumbs up. I give it a thumbs up too but at the same time I don’t have the urge to read the rest of the books in the quintet. One of my reading goals for this year is to read more of the classics or the books that are on the many “Books You Must Read Before You Die” lists. I’m glad I was able to cross this book off and I’m really glad I read it.