A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle Review: A Newbery-Winning Classic of Enduring Power

A Wrinkle in Time is a science fantasy novel — the first entry in Madeleine L'Engle's five-book Time Quintet — originally published in 1962. Its central figure is Meg Murry, a self-doubting but fiercely intelligent teenager who, along with her preternaturally gifted younger brother Charles Wallace and her classmate Calvin O'Keefe, is guided by three supernatural beings — Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which — through a phenomenon called a tesseract, a wrinkle in the fabric of space-time. Their destination is the planet Camazotz, where Meg's father, a physicist named Mr. Murray, is being held captive by a malevolent force known as IT — a pulsing, disembodied brain that imposes absolute conformity. The stakes extend beyond the Murray family: a dark evil called the Black Thing is described as threatening the entire universe. The novel is structured as a rescue mission, but its true engine is Meg's interior struggle with fear, self-worth, and love.

Few debut children's novels have had as turbulent or ultimately triumphant a reception as this one. L'Engle's manuscript was famously rejected by some 26 publishers before John Farrar of Farrar, Straus and Giroux agreed to publish it under the Ariel imprint. The gamble paid off decisively: in 1963 the Association for Library Service to Children awarded it the Newbery Medal, given annually to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American children's literature. It also won the Sequoyah Book Award and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and was a runner-up for the Hans Christian Andersen Award. More than six decades later, it remains the opening volume of a beloved five-book series, and its cultural reach has extended to film, television, and — as a prominent pop-culture reference — the Netflix series Stranger Things.

L'Engle's decision to place an awkward, self-critical girl at the heart of a science-fantasy adventure was itself a departure from convention. As Wikipedia's reception summary notes, some early critics flagged the choice as a flaw — an indication of how unusual it was at the time. The novel blends concepts from theoretical physics (the tesseract, the fifth dimension) with Christian theological themes and the emotional texture of a middle-grade coming-of-age story, a combination that had no obvious precedent. Librarian Carolyn Horovitz, writing in the retrospective Newbery and Caldecott Medal Books: 1956–1965, acknowledged that the book is "good entertainment and that the writer carries the story along with a great deal of verve." Its willingness to ask large questions — about conformity, free will, the nature of evil, and what it means to love imperfect people — within the frame of a children's adventure gave it a gravity uncommon in the genre.

L'Engle's liberal Christian worldview, woven throughout the novel, has made A Wrinkle in Time a perennial target of criticism from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Conservative Christian groups have objected to certain elements as incompatible with orthodox belief, while others have challenged the book on entirely different grounds. It has appeared on challenged and banned book lists, a distinction that underscores how much interpretive weight the novel has always carried. Horovitz also raised a more literary reservation, noting there is "some question about the depth of its quality" alongside its undeniable entertainment value — a critique that has followed the book into the scholarly conversation ever since. These tensions are part of the novel's record, not incidental to it.

The edition under review is the Square Fish reprint, published in May 2007 alongside the rest of the Time Quintet. It includes two items not present in the original publication: a previously unpublished interview with L'Engle and a transcription of her Newbery Medal acceptance speech — materials that add historical and biographical context for readers who want to understand the novel's origins and its author's intentions. The novel is designed for readers aged nine and up, and the Time Quintet framing means that those who connect with Meg's story have four subsequent volumes to continue into. Readers drawn to science fantasy with emotional depth, questions of good versus evil on a cosmic scale, and a protagonist whose defining weapon is love rather than physical power are the book's core audience — though its theological undercurrents and conceptual density mean it rewards different things at different ages.