Wrinkling

What I read:
The three Mrs. take Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace to another planet called Uriel.  Once they arrive, Meg believes that they have traveled through another dimension.  The three Mrs. explain that they have wrinkled in time.  This is explained by using the drawing of the ant below.  In the book, there is the concept that if an ant walks on a string from one end to the other, it might take 10 seconds.  But if a person folds the string into two parts, the ant can now walk across in less than one second.  This is the 5th Dimension in the book.

We also find out about a mysterious black shadow that is fighting against the stars and planets, especially when stars die.  It turns out that Meg's father is being held behind the black shadow, which is described as pure evil.  Meg and Charles Wallace find out that they will have to fight the Black Thing to save their father and return home with him.



In the last chapter I read the children meet an upbeat woman called The Happy Medium.  She can show them the earth and what's happening there, but she doesn't want to look at something so melancholy.  The children wrinkle in time again and end up on a planet where Meg and Charles Wallace's father is supposed to be held.  There they have to separate from the three Mrs.  Each Mrs. gives each child a gift so that they can be successful in rescuing Mr. Murry.  They leave the three Mrs. and go into a really weird town where all everything is synchronized and no one seems like a real person.   


What I thought about:
The way that evil is being represented in this book is amazing.  Making dark things look evil and bad is always interesting to me.  It must be hard for authors to describe with words what evil would look like if we could see it, and I think that Madeleine L'Engle did an outstanding job of describing what evil is in this book.

The concept of having a 5th Dimension (tessering or wrinkling through time) is also really fascinating.  L'Engle describes this concept of science fiction with pictures, like the one of the ant shown above.  I think that this is extremely well done in the book because it's such a complicated theme but it's so easy to understand.  It's hard to describe this in words, but with the pictures it's all clear.  I love this idea of wrinkling through time in the 5th Dimension and wish that this were possible.

What I conclude:
At this point I'm about half way through the book.  I always liked science fiction and I'm not surprised that I'm really enjoying this book.  Probably talking about the dimensions is not my favorite science fiction theme, but this book is well written all the same.

At first I thought that the three Mrs. were witches because they seemed so magical.  But in these chapters that I read, we find out that Mrs. Whatsit was actually a star who gave up her star life to fight the Black Thing and saved much of the Milky Way galaxy by doing so.  This to me seems much cooler than being a witch.  Being a former star seems much more magical and strange.  I like the idea that now she can take a human form, but that's still a star.