A Wrinkle in Time

Erik Kain

Erik writes about video games at Forbes and politics at Mother Jones. He's the contributor of The League though he hasn't written much here lately. He can be found occasionally composing 140 character cultural analysis on Twitter.

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22 Responses

  1. It isn’t the kind of adaptation you meant, but the cartoonist Hope Larson is currently adapting A Wrinkle In Time into a graphic novel. Most novel-to-comics adaptation suck, but this one might actually be good; Hope is a great match for this story, and the publisher is giving her 400 pages to work with, so the usual compressing-all-the-life-out-of-it problem that happens when novels become comic books won’t apply here.

     Report

  2. BlaiseP says:

    In 1977, I met Madeleine L’Engle in Wheaton Illinois.  At the time, she was something of an odd duck in the corpus of contemporary Christian authors.  Many evangelicals rejected her outright.

    My mentor, Clyde S. Kilby befriended her and she started giving her materials to the special collections of Wheaton College.Report

  3. One of the nicest little moments during my time living in New York was shaking her hand during an evensong service at St. John the Divine.Report

  4. Murali says:

    I actually had to read Wrinkle for school when I was in primary 6. I liked Charles Wallace a lot rigt until the time he got swallowed by IT.Report

  5. Michelle says:

    I first read A Wrinkle in Time when I was in grammar school and loved it. I read it several times after that. I loved it so much, I bought a copy for my stepson when he was about 11 or 12, but he never touched it or took it back to his other house with him. I just came across that copy during our recent move and thought “wow, I should read this book again.”  I’ll definitely do so now. I imagine I’ll get even more out of it than I did when I was a kid.Report

  6. Maribou says:

    Thanks for linking to that post, ED, you are absolutely spot-on as to its loveliness.  I too will have to reread it before having much to say – but L’Engle is one of my favorite authors, and this book saw me through some very rough spots as a kid.Report

  7. DensityDuck says:

    There are a lot of weird little fantasy series like this that were the only thing the author was ever famous for, and it has this cult following but never takes off.  “The Dark Is Rising” is another one like this.Report

  8. Tod Kelly says:

    A big +1 for the entire post, but an especially big +1 about the being scared as kid reading it.  I remember having nightmares about this book; I can;t think off the top of my head of any other book that did this.Report

  9. I’ll have to re-read the book.Report

  10. FridayNext says:

    L’Engle’s books were some of the first novels I read as a child along with John Christopher’s Tripod Series and other books. (I suspect The Giver would have had the same effect, but I was in my 30’s when I read it so I’d like to think I was less impressionable) All of them scared the bejeebus out of me and I loved it because they didn’t scare me in bogeyman under the bed kind of way, but in what I now understand to be a more existential way. The worlds depicted in all those novels frightened me and I was terrified that’s what the future would be.

    I will take issue with one part of E.D.’s otherwise wonderful post. He wrote “This book, and the other novels in the series, are some of my favorite fantasies.”  If he was just referring to “A Wind in the Door” and “A Swiftly Tilting Planet” I’d be all over that. But she eventually let this family, of books and the O’Keefe’s, sink into rather formulaic young adult pablum and the religious and spiritual symbolism becomes more and more ham fisted. Maybe I was a lot older when I got around to the “Second Generation,” but I recently went back and reread the first three and a couple from the remainder and it is pretty clear to me, L’Engle is more self-consciously trying to write young adult fiction rather than fiction she wanted to market to young adults.Report

  11. Jonathan says:

    I vaguely recall reading this in school. I had a series of teachers who loved sci-fi and fantasy, and our classes read a bunch of such books – some well-known, some that were cult hits. Consequently, a lot of the stories bleed into each other in my memories, and I can rarely remember which book was which. Such is the case with A Wrinkle in Time.Report