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.