A Wrinkle in Time

This one showed up in almost every childhood library box I’ve sorted through professionally, spine soft from handling, name written and crossed out and rewritten inside the cover two or three times over, clearly a book that got passed hand to hand for years before it landed with me. I never read it as a kid myself, missed it entirely, so I came to Meg Murry’s search for her missing father as a grown adult with no nostalgia cushioning the experience, for better or worse.

Meg, her prodigy little brother Charles Wallace, and a boy named Calvin get swept across the universe by three strange beings to find Meg’s father, and what struck me reading it cold is how much the book trusts a young reader with real difficulty, real fear, a father who isn’t simply rescued and made whole again by the act of finding him. The tesseract concept, folding space rather than crossing it, is handled with more genuine physics-mindedness than I expected from a book this size and this age.

Where I felt the seams a little, and I know I’m not alone in this, the ending resolves faster than the build up earns, a rush of wrap-up after a slow, careful middle. And Meg’s own arc, learning that her stubbornness and anger are actually her strength rather than a flaw to be corrected, lands better than almost anything else in the book, genuinely moving in a way I wasn’t braced for as someone reading this for the first time well past the age it’s aimed at.

I understand completely why this gets reread across a whole childhood and then again as an adult. I only got the second half of that experience, and it was still worth having.