A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L'Engle, 1962
Fantasy Young adultScience fictionContemporary fiction
A girl, her unusual brother, and a friend cross space to find her missing father, in a universe where love is a weapon against conformity. A lyrical, wonder-filled journey that moves quickly through strange places, with a warm family heart and a serious fight against conformity.
Feels like wonder, hope and dread. About love, freedom and time.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy lyrical fantasy about family, courage, and love standing against conformity. The prose dates from 1962 and can feel old-fashioned, especially in its formal descriptive passages.
Why read it
It offers a short, strange journey that treats love as active courage, and its sense of cosmic wonder still feels bracing.
A page from the book
The moment a familiar body becomes something no myth has a name for.
The wild colors of her clothes became muted, whitened. The pudding-bag shape stretched, lengthened, merged. And suddenly before the children was a creature more beautiful than any Meg had even imagined, and the beauty lay in far more than the outward description. Outwardly Mrs. Whatsit was surely no longer a Mrs. Whatsit. She was a marble-white body with powerful flanks, something like a horse but at the same time completely unlike a horse, for from the magnificently modeled back sprang a nobly formed torso, arms, and a head resembling a man’s, but a man with a perfection of dignity and virtue, an exaltation of joy such as Meg had never before seen. Madeleine L'Engle.A Wrinkle in Time was rejected by 26 publishers before Farrar, Straus and Giroux took it in 1962.
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Questions readers ask
- Is A Wrinkle in Time for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy lyrical fantasy about family, courage, and love standing against conformity. The prose dates from 1962 and can feel old-fashioned, especially in its formal descriptive passages.
- What is A Wrinkle in Time like?
- A lyrical, wonder-filled journey that moves quickly through strange places, with a warm family heart and a serious fight against conformity. Feels like wonder, hope and dread. About love, freedom and time.
- What should I read after A Wrinkle in Time?
- If you liked A Wrinkle in Time, try 11/22/63 (Stephen King), The City of Ember (Jeanne DuPrau) and The Amber Spyglass (Philip Pullman).
A taste of the feed
A case for love as something you carry, not something fated.
But I believe in love, you know; love is a uniquely portable magic. I don’t think it’s in the stars, but I do believe that blood calls to blood and mind calls to mind and heart to heart.
11/22/63 · Stephen King
A city lit entirely by lamps, and the dark it can't explain.
In the city of Ember, the sky was always dark. The only light came from great floodlamps mounted on the buildings and at the tops of poles in the middle of the larger squares. When the lights were on, they cast a yellowish glow over the streets; people walking by threw long shadows that shortened and then stretched out again. When the lights were off, as they were between nine at night and six in the morning, the city was so dark that people might as well have been wearing blindfolds.
The City of Ember · Jeanne DuPrau
What if oblivion were not an ending but a scattering into the world.
Even if it means oblivion, friends, I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing. We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.
The Amber Spyglass · Philip Pullman
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