A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle [0]
in Time
OTHER NOVELS IN THE TIME QUINTET
An Acceptable Time
Many Waters
A Swiftly Tilting Planet
A Wind in the Door
A Wrinkle
in Time
MADELEINE
L’ENGLE
FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
Square Fish
An Imprint of Holtzbrinck Publishers
A WRINKLE IN TIME.
Copyright © 1962 by Crosswicks, Ltd.
An Appreciation Copyright © 2007 by Anna Quindlen.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part
of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information,
address Square Fish, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
L’Engle, Madeleine.
A wrinkle in time.
p. cm.
Summary: Meg Murry and her friends become involved with unearthly
strangers and a search for Meg’s father, who has disappeared while engaged
in secret work for the government.
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-36755-8
ISBN-10: 0-312-36755-4
[1. Science fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.L5385 Wr 1962
62-7203
Originally published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book design by Jennifer Browne
First Square Fish Mass Market Edition: May 2007
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Charles Wadsworth Camp
and
Wallace Collin Franklin
Contents
An Appreciation by Anna Quindlen
1 Mrs Whatsit
2 Mrs Who
3 Mrs Which
4 The Black Thing
5 The Tesseract
6 The Happy Medium
7 The Man with Red Eyes
8 The Transparent Column
9 IT
10 Absolute Zero
11 Aunt Beast
12 The Foolish and the Weak
Go Fish: Questions for the Author
Newbery Medal Acceptance Speech: The Expanding Universe
An Appreciation
BY ANNA QUINDLEN
The most memorable books from our childhoods are those that make us feel less alone, convince us that our own foibles and quirks are both as individual as a finger-print and as universal as an open hand. That’s why I still have the copy of A Wrinkle in Time that was given to me when I was twelve years old. It long ago lost its dust jacket, the fabric binding is loose and water-stained, and the soft and loopy signature on its inside cover bears little resemblance to the way I sign my name today. The girl who first owned it has grown up and changed, but the book she loved, though battered, is still magical.
Its heroine is someone who feels very much alone indeed. Meg Murry has braces, glasses, and flyaway hair. She can’t seem to get anything right in school, where everyone thinks she is strange and stupid. And she runs up against some real nastiness at a young age in the form of all those snide looks and comments about her father, a scientist who seems to have mysteriously vanished—or, town gossip has it, run off with another woman.
But Meg doesn’t know real evil until she sets out on a journey to find her father and bring him home, along with her little brother, Charles Wallace, and a boy named Calvin. As they transcend time, space, and the limitations of their own minds, they get help from individuals of great goodness: Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Which, Mrs Who, the Happy Medium, and Aunt Beast. But the climax of their journey is a showdown with IT, the cold and calculating disembodied intelligence that has cast a black shadow over the universe in its quest to make everyone behave and believe the same.
If that sounds like science fiction, it’s because that’s one way to describe the story. Or perhaps you could call it the fiction of science. The action of the book, the search for Meg and Charles Wallace’s missing father, relies on something called a tesseract, which is a way to travel through time and space using a fifth dimension. Although there’s even a little illustration to make it easier to visualize, I still am not certain I do. Of course, Meg, who is so bright she can do square roots in her head, doesn’t entirely understand it either. “For just a moment I got it!” she says. “I can’t possibly explain it now, but for a second I saw it!”
The truth is, I’m not a fan of science fiction, and my math and physics gene