| $@%&! level: None “Bedroom” level: None Violence level: Low Back Cover: “It was a dark and stormy night: Meg Murry, her small brother Charles Wallace, and her mother had come down to the Kitchen for a midnight snack when they were upset by the arrival of a most disturbing stranger. 'Wild nights are my glory,' the unearthly stranger told them. 'I just got caught in a downdraft and blown off course. Let me sit down for amoment, and then I'll be on my way. Speaking of way, by the way, there is such a thing as a tessaract.' A tessaract (in case the reader doesn't know) is a wrinkle in time. To tell more would rob the reader of the enjoyment of Miss L'Engle's unusual book.” |
I'm going to start with the one part I didn't like so much, and it's really only a small thing (and a small spoiler). It's that love is the solution to everything, but in this case love is just an emotion rather than an action. Noun instead of verb. It's fine as far as it goes, but it just isn't my preferred way of doing things. If love is going to be the solution to everything, it ought to at least be an active sort.
That being said, I actually really loved it. There was just the right mix of funny, dramatic, and creepy. The “witches” were excellent characters just to start out with. You've got to love the eccentric sorts. And if the witches aren't enough, there's always the Happy Medium. She's actually kind of sweet. For the creepy, I've already mentioned the man with red eyes, and of course there's IT, which I find decidedly evil but perhaps not as scary as it was intended to be.
Speaking of which, I loved the philosophy in here about equality and freedom. L'Engle manages to get in a lot of really important ideas without ever even fracturing the overall feel of the story. Her characters learn to do a lot of mental judo, and I do enjoy a good mental judo match. When the heroes are young and small, but creative and clever, the idea of winning a physical contest is pretty unlikely. But simply figuring out how to think around the problem—that's totally doable. Oh, and Charles Wallace is a six-year-old mental judo master.