A Wrinkle In Time

I was very impressed with this book. I remember being fascinated by it when I read it in 5th or 6th grade, but I'm glad I chose to read it again--I picked up on L'engle's superior writing much more this time. Her ability to describe emotions, actions, beings, and events that would otherwise defy explanation (and which, most of the time, are either complex abstract ideas or elements which, by definition, do not exist) makes the reading enjoyable and enlightening. She has an extensive and well-expressed vocabulary and an imagination that, were this book written by any popular author fifty years later, it would only be described as "drug-fueled."

The elements of magical realism in this book are through the roof, though they have a firm ground in the notion of physics and other branches of very real science. The religious undertones are certainly there, but because of L'engle's excellent grasp of subtlety, she is able to insert a twelve-line hymn in the middle of the story without the tone of the book ever coming off as preachy.

The elements of fear and confrontation are deep and are made the basis of nearly all the action of the book.

The characters are extremely well developed, and though they border on being too romanticized, their personalities and characteristics end up fitting well with the style of the story.

Overall, the book hesitates on the diving board of character introduction and plot set-up, and then it plunges into the deep end with suspense, mystery, and psychedelic descriptions of mind-bending trips through the fabric of time-space, but the reader never feels as though they will drown.

A criticism (among only a few less mentionable ones) is that the elements of mystery sometimes take precedence in the unraveling of the action, so that the whole book seems as though it never really gets to answer every issue to the greatest extent that it could. I'm not sure how long it was before L'engle wrote the sequels to this book, but it doesn't really stand up on its own that well, given its occasional convolutedness and its abrupt and nearly unresolved ending.