A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle

Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, Merryweather, Fauna and Flora

(July 7) I had seen this on so many top-100 fiction lists, and so many people whose taste I respect have said they loved it, and it was so reverently discussed on my favourite website, that it seemed like A Wrinkle in Time would be pure rapture... like it would open up whole new universes of imaginative inventions, memorable characters, and thrilling action, à la the Harry Potter series or The Golden Compass.

Alas, no. I was disappointed. And I don't think it was because my expectations were so high they could never be met. The story didn't seem well thought out; it rushed disjointedly from one strange event or bit of science to another, and it couldn't decide whether to have the style and tone of a '60s sci-fi TV show or a Grimm's fairy tale. I kept checking my copy of the book to see if a folio was missing or something.

The point-of-view character, Meg, is little more than a collection of geeky quirks and she's often unappealingly crabby for no good reason. L'Engle seems to set up her impatience and stubbornness as virtues -- as though blind anger will save us all. Hmm.

The book touches on big topics in philosophy, physics, classics, politics, etc., and lovers of the book cite this as L'Engle's great contribution to children's literature, but to my mind these historical touchstones are simply thrown in randomly, sometimes oddly, and never developed or properly interwoven into the action or the characters' motivations.

Also, I don't think that my disappointment was caused by reading this with an adult's jaundiced eye -- I am certain it would have reminded my 10-year-old self of those Saturday-morning “filler” cartoons we barely tolerated while waiting for the “good” cartoons to come on, back in the day -- the ones full of unsympathetic protagonists running back and forth in front of half-sketched, endlessly repeating backgrounds.