PhilPaine.com

For some strange rea­son, I nev­er read the Madeleine L’Engle books when I was young. I knew about them. They were in every library, and peo­ple I knew had read them. They were high­ly thought of. I real­ly don’t know why I didn’t check them out. Well, I was def­i­nitely miss­ing some­thing. The prose of A Wrin­kle in Time is delight­ful. The book deals with inter­est­ing ideas, pre­sented in a man­ner that chil­dren can under­stand, but only if they are will­ing to stretch their minds a bit. At it was writ­ten, none of these ideas were embed­ded in pop­u­lar cul­ture, as they are today. I would rank A Wrin­kle in Time with the best Hein­lein juve­niles as books that respect a child’s intel­li­gence and treat the read­er with­out con­de­scen­sion. I’m sor­ry I missed out.