12 Comments

reread a wrinkle in time this spring and it made me feel acutely embarrassed not comforted and amused as i had hoped. so much specialness!!

also, thank you for pointing out that charles wallace IS kind of a creep.

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I find him to be so much like what an adult who does not really like children wishes children were like -- preternaturally quiet, never kicks his heels, only smart when he needs to be, etc -- which is not to say no child has ever been, or could ever be, like Charles Wallace, but something about L'Engle's description feels a bit axe-grinding. My friend Frankie wrote a bit about that tendency in L'Engle a few years ago, and I quite liked it: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/03/11/the-creepy-authoritarianism-of-madeleine-lengle/

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One of my favorite L’Engle books is her adult novel, A Severed Wasp. I enjoyed it for many reasons, but one of them is the way that so many characters from her earlier books make cameos as adults. Suzy Austin shows up as a heart surgeon (Vicky is never mentioned), and probably half a dozen other characters from her lesser known novels are mentioned in passing. It’s a fun little Easter egg for people who have read a lot of her work.

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Thanks for sharing that excellent Frankie Thomas piece! I had no idea Vicky Austin existed but learning that whole situation makes the sci-fi writing make more sense... Also, I'm 100% with you on the axe-grinding-- I grew up in a spaghetti-and-Bach-and-also-loftily-protestant family, and it was hard to get a "real" sense of Charles Wallace & the Murrys as a family?

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I have not even read a Wrinkle in Time, I had no idea what this post was about, but I imagined all the Chosen Ones in other stories getting this treatment and I ended up giggling away to myself.

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“the more time you spend in mental retreat indulging in what you think of as a “rich inner life” but what is in effect a non-stop fantasia of unmerited vengeance, grudge-nursing, and self-delusion, the worse your personality gets. And we just came here to tell you that we don’t like you.”

I KNEW IT.

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:( But I liked A Wrinkle in Time.

Mostly because I could identify with Meg feeling like a total loser.

Come to think of it, Charles Wallace was probably on the spectrum.

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I also liked a Wrinkle in Time!

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Instead of reading the entirety of "Wrinkle," my seventh graders and I are just going to stop after this^^^ chapter, and move on to "A Year Down Yonder" instead.

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Oh my god, Danny, this cut right through the virus depression and fascism panic and made me LAUGH OUT LOUD. These books deeply moved me when I was 14 and the parameters of what I could imagine as humanist dissent from the conservative theology I was being fed were... NOT WIDE. "The Book of Genesis (his choice)," Dona Nobis Pacem, and the Breastplate of St. Patrick were basically it. This is hilarious!!!

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"not worth teaching Quaker geometry to" -- you cut me to the quick, madam!

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PERFECTION.

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