I found Meg Murry, the heroine of A Wrinkle in Time, terribly easy to relate to. She was brainy and awkward and possessing of an undirected and unwieldy sexuality. I mean, I knew girls like that. I'm just saying.
Wrinkle is without a doubt one of the most memorable books of my childhood. And of course the sequels were lovely, too. I especially liked A Swiftly Tilting Planet, where Meg is an older pregnant woman still preoccupied with saving the world.
I thought about that book a lot when I was pregnant. I liked to think of myself as an inflated creampuff superhero, too.
A Wrinkle in Time was written and published during the Cold War. When I reread it as an adult, I was struck by L'Engle's description of Camazotz, the planet that is under the thumb of the totalitarian-dictator, giant-brain IT. Everyone on Camazotz lives in some kind of surburbian dystopia, where every child bounces their ball at the same time, every father comes home from work at the same time, etc., etc. It is a place characterized by horrible, stilted conformity -- and those who refuse to comply are brought to face the terrifying IT.
Was Camazotz written to bring to mind American perceptions of life in the Soviet Union? Or was it a sly critique of late-1950s American culture?
L'Engle was sufficiently complex that either interpretation, or both, is possible. She also wrote beautiful meditations on Christianity, which I always admired and ached to agree with.
God bless her. As they say: "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die."
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