The Love that IT Never Had

What I read: This week I finally finished reading A Wrinkle in Time.  Meg's father Mr. Murray tries to tesser away from IT.  He isn't so successful.  He does tesser away from IT, but he doesn't get to earth and Meg gets frozen by the Black Thing.

Suddenly Mr. Murray, Meg, and Calvin realize that they are on a planet inhabited by furry beasts with tentacles. Instead of attacking, the three beasts take Meg to cure her and help her get unfrozen.  One of these beasts becomes Aunt Beast.  She is the one who takes care of Meg while she recovers.  She does this even though she has no eyes and can't see Meg.





Fortunately the three Mrs. are on that same planet as Meg, Mr. Murray, and Calvin.  When they realize that Charles Wallace is not with them, they say that the only way to save him is for Meg to go back to Camazotz alone to rescue him from IT.  She goes back and rescues him by realizing that the only thing that she has that IT doesn't have is love.  She saves her brother with love.

At the end they all return home to Earth and reunite with the rest of their family.  to get home they wrinkle in time so that it doesn't seem like any time has passed to Meg's mother.

What I thought about:  While I was reading this book, I thought a lot about good and evil.  I thought about representations of evil, and this was especially true the week that I looked for images of evil online and came across the GIF from Fantasia's "A Night on Bald Mountain."  It's hard to think about how to represent evil in words and in pictures and I think that Madeleine L'Engle and Disney both did it well.

Another impotrant idea that I thought about was how important it is to be unique.  It's also equally important to accept your uniquness.  Meg has trouble doing this until the end of the book when she is happy to be different.  She has to go to Camazotz, though, to appreciate that it's okay to be different.  It can be hard to feel this way sometimes, but it's important to accept yourself for who you are and for all your differences.  

The last thing I thought about was the triumph of love.  In the end, Meg beats IT because she is human and is able to love.  That makes her more powerful than a super advanced brain like IT.  This is a theme that we can find in many books, movies, and stories.  I think that this one is well done and it made me like the book a lot.

What I conclude:  I liked how this book combined sci-fi and drama.  For example, tessering through time and space is one of the main sci-fi themes.  The dramatic parts are the emotional relationships between the characters.  I especially liked the relationship between Meg and Calvin because they are both dorky and intelligent.  They make a cute couple.

I recommend this book for people who like science fiction and would like to read a classic.  This book is considered a classic and has been read by many generations of children and adults since it was first published in 1963.  I also recommend this book for youngsters younger than me.  Although some of the ideas in it are complicated, they are easy to understand because the author does such a good job explaining it.