Wednesday, June 22, 2011

A Wrinkle in Time

Madeleine L'Engle

The wrinkle in time of the title referes to a tesseract, when you fold space so you can travel through great distances in a short time. If you like 90s movies, the Event Horizon traveled to Hell by way of tesseract. If you like Harry Potter tesseract is an earlier version of "dissaparate".

In a nutshell, some of the kids in the Murray family have been selected by a trio of angels disguised as old ladies to save their abducted Father in a distant planet. Charles Wallace (A five year old super genius), Meg (his rebellious sister) and Calvin (some popular dude) travel with the old ladies across the universe. First to Uriel, where winged half horse people are really happy about being winged half horse people. Here they see the big bad of the story, the Black Thing, an evil entity philophers have been fighting since forever. Eventually, they arrive in Camazotz. Here they find their father, and after many setbacks including losing Charles Wallace and Meg being seriously injured, Meg defeats the first Boss of the story. A huge brain working for the Black Thing.

This is the first of a series of books and it ends in a cliffhanger. I must admit I am not very curious about the story, and although I can't say that I didn't like the book I didn't love it either. I was put off by the overt christian themes, and Charles Wallace's dialogue. I like Meg but as a main character she was so unsure of herself. It was frustrating how everyone seemed to underestimate her. They accepted that she had loads of potential but didn't help her realize it. Given the stakes of the story (ultimate evil swallowing the Earth) I thought the romantic subplot of Meg and Calvin was forced. I still don't get why Calvin was in there at all.

I'm looking forward to Hope Larson's graphic novel adaptation. I'm sure it will help me get a different perspective on this story.

No comments:

Post a Comment