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Title | A Wrinkle in Time
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Author | Madeleine L'Engle
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Cover Art | ---
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Publisher | Dell - 1982
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First Printing | 1962
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Title | A Wind in the Door
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Author | Madeleine L'Engle
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Cover Art | ---
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Publisher | Dell - 1983
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First Printing | 1973
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Title | A Swiftly Tilting Planet
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Author | Madeleine L'Engle
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Cover Art | ---
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Publisher | Dell - 1981
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First Printing | 1978
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Title | Many Waters
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Author | Madeleine L'Engle
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Cover Art | Taeeun Yoo
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Publisher | Square Fish - 2007
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First Printing | 1986
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Title | An Acceptable Time
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Author | Madeleine L'Engle
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Cover Art | Taeeun Yoo
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Publisher | Square Fish - 2007
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First Printing | 1989
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Title | The Graphic Novel
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Author | Madeleine L'Engle
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Illustrator | Hope Larson
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Publisher | Margaret Ferguson Books - 2012
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First Printing | Margaret Ferguson Books - 2012
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Category | Fantasy / SF
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Warnings | None
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Main Characters | Meg, Charles Wallace, Calvin, Sandy, Dennys, Polly
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Main Elements | Unicorns, Angels, time travel
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Website | madeleinelengle.com
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 A Wrinkle in Time
It was a dark and stormy night; Meg Murry, her small brother Charles Wallace, and her mother had come 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 way, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseact."
A tesseract (in case the reader doesn't know) is a wrinkle in time. To tell more would rob the reader the enjoyment of Miss L'Engle's unusual book.
A Wind in the Door
A Wind in the Door is a fantastic adventure story involving Meg Murry, her small brother Charles Wallace, and Calvin O'Keefe, the chief characters of A Wrinkle in Time. The seed from which the story grows is the rather ordinary situation of Charle's Wallace having difficulting adpating to school. He is extremely bright, so much so that he gets punched around a lot for being "different." He is also strangely, seriously ill (mitochondritis - the destruction of farandolae, minute creatures of the mitochondria in the blood). Determined to help Charles Wallace in school, Meg pays a visit to his principal, Mr. Jenkins, a dry, cold man with whom Meg herself has had unfortunate run-ins. The interview with Mr. Jenkins goes badly and Meg worriedly retuns home to find Charles Wallace waiting for her. "There are," he announces, "dragons in the twins' vegetable garden. Or there were. They've moved to the north pasture now."
Dragons? Not really, but an entity, a being stranger by far than dragons; and the encounter with this alien creature is only the first setp that leads Meg, Calvin, and Mr. Jenkins out into galactic space, and then into the unimaginably small world of a mitochondrion. And, at least, safely, trumphantly, home.
A Swiftly Tilting Planet
In this companion volume to A Wrinkle in Time, and A Wind in the Door, fifteen-year-old Charles Wallace and the unicorn Gaudior undertake a perilous journey through time in a desperate attempt to stop the destruction of the world by the mad dictator Mad Dog Branzillo. They are not alone in their quest. Charles Wallace's sister, Meg - grown and expecting her first child, but still able to enter her brother's thoughts and emotions by "kything" - goes with him in spirit.
But in overcoming the challenges, Charles Wallace must face the ultimate test of his faith and will, as he is sent within four people from another time to search for a way to avert the tragedy threatening them all.
Many Waters
Some things have to believed to be seen.
Sandy and his twin brother, Dennys, are the practical, down-to-earth members of the Murry family. They have never paid much attention to their scientist parents' talk of highly theoretical things like tesseracts and farondalae. But now something had happened to Sandy and Dennys that drastically stretches their powers of belief. And, when disaster threatens the oasis where they have made their home, can they find a way back to their own time?
An Acceptable Time
Some things have to believed to be seen.
Under their feet, the ground seemed to tremble.
Polly O'Keefe has recently moved in with her grandparents, the famous scientists Alex and Kate Murry, when she wanders into a time 3,000 years before her own. Perhaps it's not an accident - as she is told by two druids: When a gate between circles of time opens, it opens for a reason. When the gate closes behind Polly and her gravely ill friend Zachary, the reason becomes clear. In this desperate time, can Polly keep herself and Zachary alive until the gate reopens to bring them home?
The Graphic Novel
Late one night, three otherworldly creatures appear and sweep Meg Murry, her brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O'Keefe away on a mission to save Mr. Murry, who has gone missing while doing top-secret work for the government. They travel via tesseract — a wrinkle that transports one across space and time — to the planet Camazotz, where Mr. Murry is being held captive. There they discover a dark force that threatens not only Mr. Murry but the safety of the whole universe.
Never before illustrated, A Wrinkle in Time is now available in a spellbinding graphic novel adaptation. Hope Larson takes the classic story to a new level with her vividly imagined interpretations of Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, Mrs Which, the Happy Medium, Aunt Beast, and the many other characters that readers have loved for the past fifty years. Winner of the 1963 Newbery Medal, A Wrinkle in Time is the first book in Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quintet.
You know how some childhood favorites remain amazing forever and time cannot tarnish how much you love them? Well, apparently that didn't work for A Wrinkle in Time for me. Ok, it wasn't a favorite to start with, and the main thing I really remembered was the picture of the ant that could walk across a wrinkle in the edge of cloth to explain the tesseract (which it turns out, is not a term invented by L'Engle, it's an actual mathematical thing). But when I reread it when the movie came out I was puzzled as to why people thought this was such an amazing book. And of course, the thing that adults never understand about kids, I totally missed the Christian aspects of the story, though they are far more explicit than in the Narnia series, in fact it kind of tries to bash it into your head it's so in your face, but I didn't remember any of that at all. I just thought the flying centaurs were cool.
I like the fact that Meg is kind of nerdy, and there is so much science behind this story I originally pegged it as an SF series (though as the series went along and the science got a bit silly and the Christian "love will fix everything" theme became predominant I had to shift it to fantasy, it's just that science works in a fantasy novel - gravity, inertia, friction don't stop working in a world of magic, but SF has no room for anything remotely magical, and saving the world with a big hug just isn't really scientific, sorry). But don't get me wrong, there is nothing bad about exposing kids to scientific principles, even in a fantasy setting. And I have nothing against the Christian themes either. But I just found the story a bit disjointed, and the ending unsatisfying, I mean yes, they rescue their father, but the big evil is still out there. They didn't defeat it, they just escaped it. And then it is NEVER mentioned in any of the subsequent books!!! Like it never happened. In fact by the last one the father seems to have forgotten his weird experience and refuses to believe the experience of his granddaughter Polly.
The worst one is A Wind in the Door, the "fix everything with a hug" theme is the strongest here, and the main character is an angel which happens to be a confusing mass of wings and eyes, and shrinking down to near quantum size in a world where people can't see with their eyes but can use a kind of telepathy called kything, was downright incomprehensible. Maybe kids are able to imagine what L'Engle is describing, but it was just too weird for me.
A Swiftly Tilting planet I actually enjoyed. Not just because the main character Gaudior is a unicorn, but it had understandable time travel, as well as Charles Wallace finding himself reliving other people's lives, looking for a way to change the past without irrevocably destorying the future.
Many Waters is a really odd Noah's Ark story. It was a little long without too much going on, overt sexual scenarios where nephilim are trying to seduce human women. On the other hand it did have virtual or quantum unicorns, that could only be held in one place if being observed, like a particle. And the word "slut" was used. My jaw dropped. I mean I know L'Engle is trying to represent the types of people God is going to wipe out with the flood, but one of the twins using that word just shocked me in a kids book. Clearly we're now in young adult stories! It has some interesting characters and ideas in it, but it just meandered and I found it boring overall.
An Acceptable Time had a similar problem of taking forever before anything interesting really started to happen. And hey, wasn't Dr. Louise actually Louise the Larger in A Wind in the Door? And now she's the biggest skeptic of them all? I'm confused. And mountains do not go from being like the Rockies, jagged and snowcapped, to being like the soft, rounded Appalachians in just three thousand years. Three hundred thousand maybe, but if a mountain would wear down that fast, the pyramids would be gone by now too. And by the halfway point I was about ready to scream if someone said "three thousand years" again. Maybe L'Engle thought her readers didn't do well with numbers or time and needed to be reminded every second page? But once the story really got going, there was actually some action that kept the reader interested, and some love triangles to keep things complicated.
All in all, I was expected a series of books I would love, but in the end found them to be disappointing and even kind of boring, if not flat out confusing and baffling. It's funny though, I've read her non-SFF books about the Austins and really enjoyed those, simple stories about a group of kids growing up in a rural town, those were beautiful and nostalgic to read. But this, her more famous series, is just plain weird. But then kids may understand things that even computer engineers (who briefly considered actually going into astronomy but then decided she didn't like to work nights) can't follow.
July 2022
The Graphic Novel - I was plundering the library for all it's science fiction graphic novels and was curious to see how one would adapt this one. Truth was, it was a bit weird. Not that the original isn't weird, but Charles Wallace's giant eyes just came off as creepy. I didn't remember Meg being quite so annoying, I know she was a troubled kid but she just got on my nerves. And there are some things that work better left to the imagination. It was a faithful retelling with quality artwork, just not sure it was required, but if it gets some kids to read more because it has "pictures", then I guess that's all to the good.
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