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.”
This page prints on a single page. Use Ctrl+P / Cmd+P.
A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L'Engle (1962) · 256pages · Contemporary · 2 AP appearances
Summary
Meg Murry — awkward, brilliant, angry — is thirteen and failing school while her father has been missing for a year. Three mysterious women (Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which) arrive and tesser — wrinkle through space-time — Meg, her genius little brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O'Keefe to the planet Camazotz, where a disembodied brain called IT holds their father captive and demands total conformity. Meg finds her father but IT seizes Charles Wallace. She realizes the one weapon IT cannot replicate or resist is love — not as sentiment, but as active, stubborn choice — and she uses it to rescue Charles Wallace and return home.
Why It Matters
A Wrinkle in Time was rejected 26 times before publication and went on to win the 1963 Newbery Medal, becoming one of the bestselling children's novels in American history with over 14 million copies sold. It is regularly cited as the book that opened science fiction and fantasy to young female r...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: Accessible and direct, with sudden elevations into scientific or theological vocabulary at moments of greatest significance
Narrator: Third-person limited, tightly focused on Meg. The narrator has access to Meg's thoughts, fears, and physical sensatio...
Figurative Language: Moderate
Historical Context
1962 America — Cold War, nuclear anxiety, early Space Age, Civil Rights Movement: Camazotz is unmistakably a Cold War nightmare — a society where conformity is enforced by an invisible central authority, where individuality is pathology, and where the cost of deviation is absorp...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Meg is described as failing school, getting in fights, and being a social disaster — yet she saves the universe. What does L'Engle think the relationship is between school success and actual human worth?
- Charles Wallace is the most intelligent character in the novel. Why does he fall to IT when Meg, who is 'bad at school,' does not?
- IT insists 'on Camazotz we are all happy because we are all alike.' Is IT telling the truth about the happiness? What would L'Engle say happiness actually requires?
- The three women — Whatsit, Who, Which — gave up their star-lives to fight the darkness. They don't complain about this or ask for recognition. What does their sacrifice say about L'Engle's definition of love?
- Mrs Who communicates only in quotations from other writers. What is L'Engle suggesting about how language works — and about the relationship between reading and the ability to express difficult truths?
Notable Quotes
“She wasn't going to cry. She wasn't, she wasn't, she wasn't.”
“There is such a thing as a tesseract.”
“Nothing, nothing, nothing. No meals, no times I'm supposed to be in, no nothing. How do you think I feel?”
Why Read This
Because Meg Murry is the first protagonist who gets to be a mess — angry, failing school, socially awkward — and save the universe anyway. Not by fixing herself, not by becoming prettier or calmer or more cooperative, but by using the specific tex...