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A review by ireney5
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
4.0
3.5 stars
The most exciting part of this book was the middle chunk, when the kids first interact with the horrifyingly uniform people of Camazotz (reminded me of a lot of [b:1984|40961427|1984|George Orwell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1532714506l/40961427._SX50_.jpg|153313], actually, and made me sit up with sudden interest) and the subsequent move to Ixchel and the nice-but-unfortunately-faceless-and-hairy beings over there.
The beginning was slow and a bit tedious, and I thought I was going to give the book just 1 or 2 stars at that point. The ending was very much deus ex machina (Meg shows up to save Charles Wallace and is able to because of the power of her love, yawn, and the book ends within a couple of pages of that anticlimactic showdown) .
Kudos to this book for its sheer creativity and originality of thought. Were it published now, I'd be a lot less impressed, but for a book of the early 1960s, it certainly deserves the amount of recognition it's received over the years. The tesseract, the centaur-like true forms of Mrs Whatsit and the others, the infallible nature of the Murry parents, theMeg's greatest strengths are her biggest flaws (her impatience, temper, disrespect for authority, etc) all make this book stand apart from the rest.
(Also, random, but I love that Meg's mom, Dr. Murry, is literally a genius scientist who is also really freaking hot. Beauty and brains can and do go together, and it was just a nice detail that she's such a brilliant scientist but is also gorgeous. You'd think that at this time, books would characterize genius scientist women as sacrificing their femininity, and I believe a lot of books did.)
I'm glad that while it took me many years of owning this book, I finally got myself to read it. I might even pick up the sequel.
*Read for 2020 Genre Challenge, July: Time Travel*
The most exciting part of this book was the middle chunk, when the kids first interact with the horrifyingly uniform people of Camazotz (reminded me of a lot of [b:1984|40961427|1984|George Orwell|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1532714506l/40961427._SX50_.jpg|153313], actually, and made me sit up with sudden interest) and the subsequent move to Ixchel and the nice-but-unfortunately-faceless-and-hairy beings over there.
The beginning was slow and a bit tedious, and I thought I was going to give the book just 1 or 2 stars at that point. The ending was very much deus ex machina
Kudos to this book for its sheer creativity and originality of thought. Were it published now, I'd be a lot less impressed, but for a book of the early 1960s, it certainly deserves the amount of recognition it's received over the years. The tesseract, the centaur-like true forms of Mrs Whatsit and the others, the infallible nature of the Murry parents, the
(Also, random, but I love that Meg's mom, Dr. Murry, is literally a genius scientist who is also really freaking hot. Beauty and brains can and do go together, and it was just a nice detail that she's such a brilliant scientist but is also gorgeous. You'd think that at this time, books would characterize genius scientist women as sacrificing their femininity, and I believe a lot of books did.)
I'm glad that while it took me many years of owning this book, I finally got myself to read it. I might even pick up the sequel.
*Read for 2020 Genre Challenge, July: Time Travel*