Liverwurst and Little League were two of the most interesting words I read in the first chapter or two of "A Wrinkle In Time", and I am still trying to place them. As some of you might have been aware, I have read a lot of Young Adult Fantasy, but somehow I have not read "A Wrinkle In Time", or at least, I haven't finished it. And in fact, even more oddly, I don't know much about it. When was this book published? Who was its target audience? I do know that it won a Newberry Medal and was followed by either a series of sequels, or was part of a series, depending on how you look at it. (And this is an important question). So what was it like to actually read this famous book that I had somehow missed?
(Some of this might be covered above, but I am doing my own short plot recap before launching into my own take)
Meg Murry is typical suburban girl dealing with...wait, no she isn't. Meg Murry is the child of two scientific researchers, but her father, a physicist, has disappeared. She lives with her mother, twin brothers, and younger brother, who is some type of genius. (And, today, might have been diagnosed with something). At the beginning of the book, she is living a typical adolescent life, with rebellion at school, and a crush on an older boy. I think this is sometime in the 60s or 70s: children were playing Little League, but still eating "liverwurst", whatever that is, and not pizza. This typical life is interrupted when three neighbor women are revealed to be extradimensional entities that whisk Meg, her little brother Charles Wallace, and slightly older crush (and also secretly a genius) Calvin away to another planet, where they reveal that the world is under attack by an evil force, and after visiting a planet where it is ascendant, they rescue their father and escape. But now they have Charles Wallace, and finally, (after meeting some other wise alien guides), uses the power of her love to free her brother and then they all return to earth, although there is room for a sequel hook, because the bad force is still out there.
Part of the problem with my reading is that several of the plot elements of this book, which were probably creative at the time (although, of course, this post-dates The Chronicles of Narnia, so not totally novel), are not bog standard ways to introduce your YA fantasy novel. The quick transition between typical adolescent life and cosmological strife does happen a bit fast (and that has bothered me in totally different contexts), but of course this book was written for younger people. The wise guides who can help, but only so much, and whose main job is getting the character in touch with their emotions is also something we are used to seeing. The evil force being an energy vampire who destroys creativity was also not a surprise, but again, maybe an original idea to put that there instead of a teeth-gnashing monster.
But what I really wonder about this book is what type of "real world" conflicts does the fantasy plotline mirror. Taking away the science-fiction elements, this is a book about a smart, non-conforming girl who doesn't fit in with middle-class adolescence. That is in some ways a universal story, but some parts of the book seem to be specifically about rebellion from suburban conformity---the central conflict of the Baby Boom generation. And then the deeper story behind that is whether Meg's anger at the world is a healthy thing or not. That probably would have had a lot of resonance in the 60s and 70s. A story like this is not all that far, thematically, from the books that Judy Blume wrote. And this is also I wonder when this came out, and whether it being part of a series was planned. Today, such a story would automatically be picked by up by editors as being relatable conflict with girls of a certain age, and would have been probably edited to make Meg more of a "girlboss". After all, before she wrote The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins had already written the "Gregor the Overlander" series, and the literary and commercial possibilities of The Hunger Games were probably obvious from the beginning. So was this book written with the specific purpose of giving us a series of books with a quirky, headstrong tween protagonist? Or did the mysteriously-named Madeleine L'Engle just dream this world up with no idea of its social impact?
I know many of these questions are outside of the purview of the book as a story-in-itself. But while I was reading this, I found myself more curious about where this book fit in the history of publishing and YA literature, and the "why" of the story. But of course, many internal aspects of the story can't be understood without looking at the external aspects of the story. Which, having written this unpolluted, I now feel myself able to go and research. Besides I have work in 13 minutes.