A Wrinkle in Time

I desperately wanted to like this book. It's a Newberry winner. It won a Sequoyah Book Award and  Lewis Carroll Shelf award and was a runner-up for the Hans Christian Andersen Award. It's a classic. But I just did not. Before reading this book, I think that I had always recognized, at least subconsciously, that there was a distinction between science fiction and fantasy, but I had never considered it closely. This book made it very clear to me that the two are quite different. 

I like fantasy. I am an avid Harry Potter fan, and before that, I loved the Chronicles of Narnia as well as animal fantasy books like Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web. However, the main problem for me with science fiction books is the fact that they contain stories that are allegedly possible. The idea is that sometime in the past (or future), the events of the book could have actually happened if the scientific knowledge had developed adequately, whereas with fantasy, it is evident from the start that none of the events ever could have happened or ever will happen.  Because of this, I am able to overlook inconsistencies with the world as I know it in fantasy books, something I am not able to do when reading science fiction books. 


With A Wrinkle in Time I could not get beyond the incredulity of the events to allow my imagination to run free. I was constantly hung up on details such as the three witches who are actually fallen stars who are actually centaurs who are actually nothing at all or the magical creatures that are like octopi but have no faces and smell wonderful. Ahhhhhh! What??

Truthfully, despite my best efforts to maintain neutrality about it being a science fiction novel, this book rubbed me the wrong way right from the start. I found that the author took too long to describe things that I thought were integral to the story, causing me to read faster and more agitatedly than I normally would in an attempt to have my questions answered. For example, the concept of a "tesseract" is introduced in chapter one but is not explained until chapter five, despite being mentioned frequently in the interceding chapters. At other times, the author never explains things at all. Specifically, there is a little boy named Charles Wallace who has an uncanny ability to understand others, almost such that it seems he reads minds. However, even at the end of the book, I was left entirely perplexed as to why he was like this. Was he a special type of human? Was he magical? Was he some non-human entity? Had his scientist parents given him a special concoction as a baby?

Besides confusing, I also found the main characters very one-dimensional. Meg, the protagonist, is completely obsessed with finding her father and literally mentions it on almost every page (No exaggeration here. See pages 116-125 of chapters 6 and 7 for proof). Her friend Calvin never seems to do anything but hold Meg's hand when she is scared and impress everyone with his basketball skills.

In the end, my apologies to all science fiction fans, but I just would not recommend this book. Not only did I find it bizarre, but even as a piece of literature, it was not written for any particular age group. The vocabulary (e.g. ephemeral, aberration, propitious), difficult scientific concepts (e.g. the dimensions, chemistry, atomic structure), and allusions to classic literature (e.g. Shakespeare, the Bible) would suggest that the book is most appropriate for a middle school audience. However, the very basic plot structure and one-dimensional characters would suggest that the book is most appropriate for a younger audience. I think this is why I simultaneously raced through it and was boggled by it, and I think that readers would be too.

The Green Glass Sea

I don't truthfully remember the last time that I was so enraptured by a book that I grew disappointed whenever I had to set it down. Ellen Klages' The Green Glass Sea did just this for me. 

Set in the early to mid 1940s, her historical fiction novel traces the story of the then top-secret Manhattan Project from a unique perspective - that of the children of the scientists. She brilliantly plays with points of view, using third person limited and switching between two different girls, Dewey and Suze, who eventually come to have a lot more in common than just living together in the secret town of Los Alamos. In doing this, the story becomes much more intimate than most perspectives on the Manhattan Project. Readers hear about how challenging it was to live in a place that did not really exist, how lonely it was to have parents whose important work kept them from their children, how depressing it was to live in a place that was mostly desert, and how difficult it was to keep everything secret.

This personal viewpoint also meant that the event that would traditionally be considered the culmination of the Manhattan Project - the bombing of Hiroshima - is mentioned only in passing on the last page of the novel. The climax of the book (which I will not give away) is a much more personal event for the main characters of the story, and I loved that about it.

I also loved the non-traditional perspective on scientists that The Green Glass Sea offered. To begin with, it defeated the stereotypes of scientists as people who wear white coats, have crazy hair and glasses, and live in their labs. At one point, Dewey explicitly notices this while she is sitting in the dining hall at Los Alamos reading a comic book. "[Dewey] had just gotten to the part where Wonder Woman found the hideout of the bad guy, a Nazi mad scientist who was going to blow up the world. You knew he was a scientist because he wore a long white coat and had a pointy beard and thick glasses. She looked around the room and thought about that. Just about everyone she could see, every man at least, was some kind of scientist in real life. But nobody, not one of them, looked like the one in the comic. No white coats, just T-shirts and plaid shirts and blue jeans." (p. 87)

Not only did The Green Glass Sea validate non-traditional views of scientists' appearances, but also validated female scientists. In addition to the main characters both being girls, one of whom was very interested in building and exploring "gizmos", there is also a strong female scientist in Suze's mother. She is a brilliant chemist and takes great interest in Dewey's "gizmos".

The Green Glass Sea has won a plethora of awards, all of which were well-deserved. I felt for Dewey; I felt for Suze; I was moved to tears on several occasions. I have always loved historical fiction, and I will definitely add this to my list of loved historical fiction books. I would highly recommend this book for upper elementary students, especially in conjunction with a social studies unit on World War II to make it more personal and alive.

So what exactly is the "green glass sea"? You'll have to read it to find out!