I wanted to begin this blog with a recommendation. But when I read some of the comments left on Amazon about the book I was going to recommend, Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, another idea came to me.
I loved this book when I was a kid. I absolutely adored Meg Murray, Charles Wallace, and Calvin O’Keefe. But what I loved most about the book was that it made me think. It stretched my brain muscles in a way that no other book had before. The completely believable science behind the tesseract made the trio’s journey to find Meg’s and Charles Wallace’s father seem like it could have happened yesterday. The brilliant flash of understanding that the reader experiences along with Meg when Mrs. Whatsit explains how the tesseract works is truly magical.
Having said this, I wanted to comment on the fact that there are some out there that don’t understand the magic behind the words Ms. L’Engle weaves. Or perhaps it IS the magic she weaves that they are frightened of. Either way, to dismiss this book as mere garbage is doing the entire Science Fiction genre a disservice. Perhaps, after all is said and done, the type of people who don’t enjoy stories like this should stick to non-fiction. Either that or do some of those brain exercises on the Nintendo DS.
Having read the book multiple times, I must say I never realized the religious allegory in the story. Perhaps because it wasn’t as blatant as that in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, I simply missed the cues. Or perhaps we’re digging too deeply into stories that are meant to be stories. I always find it a bit depressing when a good story, that’s excellent in its own right, is dissected into its component parts to infer some underlying reason for its existence. Detailing those mysteries seems to cheapen the experience of reading the book to begin with.
Maybe that’s why I’m not an English major anymore…
