A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

I absolutely loved this book as a kid. (I feel like that is a common theme for how I'm starting all of these book post reviews lately.) I read it so many times, but I haven't revisited it since I was in high school, I bet, and I wanted to see how I felt about it now as an adult. I was sucked in from the first chapter, and polished this off in an afternoon/evening while we watched our family movie for FPMN last night (it was The Sword in the Stone and I have no interest in that movie so I was reading surreptitiously on the side). And this time around, I think my experience was a little different. I loved, loved the beginning chapters where we meet all the characters--Meg, Charles Wallace, their mother, and Calvin. I instantly felt connected to all of them and loved them all. I especially love Meg and her angsty teenager-y-ness and her anger and stubbornness. She is grumpy and nasty sometimes and does things like yelling at her long-forgotten father in a selfish way, but it's so believable and real because that is how a stressed-out teenager would act. I also loved Calvin and how he is so open about loving the Murrys and his not fitting in with anyone else.

But I felt way more disconnected to the story once things got science fiction-y and they left the world and started tesseracting. I felt like L'Engle didn't describe much of the inter-world setting and I couldn't envision what they were seeing and doing. Like I couldn't really imagine what Mrs. Whatsit looked like when she transformed into the centaur that definitely wasn't like a centaur because it was indescribable to Meg. So many things were "indescribable" and it felt a little bit like a cop-out. However, that only tainted my enjoyment of a few scenes and I still felt very invested in the rest of the story, like when they get to Camazotz and meet IT, and when Meg has the climactic battle of love to save Charles Wallace from IT. I wish there were a little more at the end--the ending was so sudden and there wasn't enough closure to how they all were at home again. I am planning to re-read all the rest of the series as well. I didn't know that there were five books in this set--I'd only read four--but I have all of them now and I am going to work my way through them again.