Book Bearings
A Wrinkle in Time
Book 1 of Time Quintet
- 212 pages · about 4 hours
- First published 1962
- 105 editions
Bookshop.org links may earn us a commission. It supports independent bookstores and costs you nothing.
1 About this book
Meg Murry is thirteen, awkward and angry, and her father, a scientist, has been missing for years. One stormy night a strange old woman, Mrs Whatsit, arrives at the Murrys' house and mentions a tesseract, the very thing Meg's father was working on. With her small brother Charles Wallace, a child of unusual gifts, and Calvin, a boy from school, Meg is taken by Mrs Whatsit and her two companions on a journey across space and time. Their task is to find Meg's father and to face the Black Thing, a darkness that is spreading over many worlds. Madeleine L'Engle's novel, published in 1962, is the first of her Time Quintet.
- Science fiction
- Friendship
- Classics
- Love
- Space and time
- Time travel
- Brothers and sisters
- Extraterrestrial beings
2 What to expect
A children's science fantasy from 1962: an awkward thirteen-year-old, her gifted little brother and a friend travel across the universe to rescue her missing father. It mixes physics with fairy-tale helpers and a strong religious sense of light against darkness, and it argues for love and individuality against enforced sameness. It is short, strange and earnest, quick at the start and more abstract toward its close.
Good for readers who want: classic children's science fantasy, an unlikely heroine, and a short read.
3 About Madeleine L'Engle
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 Similar books
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
- Eragon by Christopher Paolini
- Ten Thousand Skies Above You by Claudia Gray
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll