Book review: A Wrinkle in Time

Wiki tells us that A Wrinkle in Time is a young adult science fantasy novel written by American author Madeleine L'Engle. First published in 1962, the book won the Newbery Medal, the Sequoyah Book Award and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and was runner-up for the Hans Christian Andersen Award. The main characters... embark on a journey through space and time, from galaxy to galaxy, as they endeavor to rescue the Murrys' father and fight The Black Thing that has intruded into several worlds and that is about right. It is a child's book - our copy has "Alice Jewell" written into it, so E must have borrowed it from her - but I'm afraid I could not love it; though one should be aware that a sixty year old is not the target audience. The natural comparison is to Narnia I think, but it does not fare well.

Like Narnia, the book has barely-concealed Christian overtones; though amusingly the "guardian angels" look enough like three witches to have confused some of the duller Christian folk. Unlike Narnia... I'm not sure exactly. I dislike the tone. The book is flat. Perhaps this review says some of it.

But perhaps more than anything else I just didn't enjoy reading it, and had to force myself to keep going. Partly that is because the characters - well, Meg at least, but she is central - keep having Deep Emotional Problems and this jars; because whilst her problems are deep, they all play out on the integer scale of {0, 1} which is wearing. Yes! The book has no subtlety.