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.”
Short 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.
Detailed Summary
The novel opens on a stormy night in the Murry farmhouse. Meg Murry, thirteen, can't sleep — she's failing multiple subjects at school, has been getting into fights, and is teased mercilessly for being strange. Her father, a brilliant physicist working for the government, has been missing for over a...