A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L'Engle (1962)
“Rejected by 26 publishers, this science-fiction fable about a misfit girl who saves the universe by loving her father became one of the most banned books in American classrooms.”
Character Analysis
L'Engle's most radical act was making her hero bad at school, bad at social performance, and chronically furious — and never asking her to stop. Meg's defects are her weapons: her refusal to accept IT's version of Charles Wallace as real is an extension of the same stubbornness that gets her in fights at school. She is not chosen because she is special; she is the only one who can go back to Camazotz because she is the only one who loves Charles Wallace with the specific, unreasonable particularity that IT cannot absorb. Her arc is not from flawed to fixed but from ashamed of her nature to wielding it.
Blunt, self-interrupting, heavy on contractions and repetition. Frequently uses fragments under emotional stress. Anger makes her sentences shorter.