Reader's Diary #1032- Madeleine L'Engle: A Wrinkle in Time

With the endless daylight and sudden jump in temperatures, my sleep patterns lately— never what you'd call normal— have been thrown horribly awry. There were more than a few nights that either I or my daughter fell asleep during our nightly read aloud of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Subsequent nights we'd need to skim over the previous chapter just to have a clue as to what was going on.

What was going on?  I can't possibly summarize the whole thing, but it's about three young people who travel through space with the help of three supernatural beings known as Mrs Who, Mrs Whatsit, and Mrs Which. Two of the young people, Meg and Charles Wallace, are looking for their scientist father who disappeared over a year ago while working on something called a tesseract.

With my current sleep dysfunction, I'll take the blame for finding the book confusing at times. Still, with our recaps we managed to make sense of it and that's not the reason I can't say I really enjoyed the book. That was mostly because I found the characters somewhat underdeveloped and the philosophical stuff a bit overdeveloped.

A Wrinkle in Time did have cool sci-fi concepts that I was happy to introduce to my daughter for the first time. A tesseract that acts as a sort of wormhole, short-cutting incredible distances through space reminded me of all those Stephen Hawking books. Likewise, the IT character, the large brain that controlled a whole planet of people, reminded me of the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation. And I'll give L'Engle credit for actually starting her book with "It was a dark and stormy night." She wasn't the first to use the cliche and I think it was a pretty audacious thing for her to do, considering the phrase's reputation.

But, with my aforementioned issues, I don't think I'll go further with the series.