Thoughts on A Wrinkle in Time

I’m sure I read A Wrinkle In Time at some point during my youth but have no recollection of it. My daughter recently read it with one of her classes and so I figured I should revisit it.

Sadly, I was unimpressed. I know that will be sacrilege to some people and I can hear a lot of the arguments already. It’s not just because it’s intended as a book for kids and it’s not related to the era in which it was written. The prose is good, but the story and pacing are lacking. She takes the first third of the book to introduce the characters, but then for how important Meg’s personality is to the climax of the book and Charles’ isn’t, it’s never tied back to who we learned so much about at the beginning. That would be fine except for the fact any character growth is hand-waved away with a few sentences rather than taking us along that growth through the experiences of the story.

Sadly, I think the book’s biggest flaw is with the religious views of the author and how that worldview makes for uninspired storytelling. The big bad is an authoritarian superbeing who wants to control everything and so is, defacto, evil. But we’re supposed to root for and find inspiration from God and His angels — the authority that supposedly created and has a purpose for everything but is good, because reasons? I think we’re supposed to be inspired by the sonnet analogy at how great God is because at least He gives you the flexibility to chose the words of the sonnet into which you’re forced to exist. But there’s no acknowledgement that that’s still control or what the real meaning of free will is. Is the takeaway just that we should be grateful that one authority gives us the right to love while the other doesn’t? Rather than a thoughtful examination of free will and control, the author is trapped within her view of the authority and assumed goodness of God and so she can’t examine it honestly. Without the religious aspect, it might have been good (as seen in so many other stories of hive minds) but instead the oblivious hypocrisy makes it fall flat.

I also really felt like the pacing was totally off. It was like she got halfway into writing it and remembered she was writing a children’s book that can’t be 500 pages so she just abridged the entire second and third acts of the story and dedicated literally 4 pages from the climax to the end of the book with no wrap-up.

I understand why this book was important for a lot of people and how for those of faith it may resonate more. But I think in the realm of science fiction and big universal questions, you need to tell a different story than this one if you can’t step out of that worldview.

I’m glad I read (reread?) A Wrinkle In Time for its cultural relevance if nothing else. However, I won’t bother with any of the rest of the Time Quintet.