A Wrinkle in Time

Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time is a fantasy for 10 year olds that begins with a hurricane, a locked-up house and a stranger at the door.

What happens

Meg Murry is having a terrible year. She has been dropped to the bottom set. A teacher has told her she does not understand how a girl with parents like hers can be such a poor student. That morning she threw her books in the road and punched a boy for calling her little brother dumb, and came home with a torn blouse and a black eye.

And her father is gone. He went away and has not come back, and the whole village has opinions about it. The postmistress asks after him with a sugary smile.

Her mother will not say he is not coming home. Her mother is a scientist with a laboratory in the old dairy off the kitchen and a way of staying perfectly calm that Meg cannot copy.

Charles Wallace is five. He did not speak at all until he was nearly four and now talks in whole clean sentences, knows when Meg is awake and unhappy, and has milk already warming on the stove when she comes down. The neighbours say he is not quite right.

Then the dog barks, the door opens, and in comes an old woman in boots and four scarves who says she was blown off course. She eats a sandwich. She admits she took the constable's wife's sheets. And on her way out, pulling her boots back on, she mentions that there is such a thing as a tesseract.

Meg's mother goes very still.

What it feels like to read is being the child who does everything wrong. Meg is prickly and furious and knows it. She keeps catching her own bad temper halfway out of her mouth. If you've got a reader who has ever been told they are not applying themselves, this will land.

The other children are good company too. Calvin O'Keefe is tall and freckled and popular and has turned up in the woods mainly to get away from his own family. Sandy and Dennys, the twins, sail through school and cannot see what the fuss is about.

One thing about the year it was written. This is 1962 America and it shows, in the French toast, the pyjama brands, and the way the children use the word moron about each other. There is a lot of adult unkindness aimed at children here, about how clever they are or are not, and it is not softened.

That is rather the point. The book takes two children everybody has written off and hands them something enormous.

What to read next

If that mixture of family, strangeness and a missing father suits them, When You Reach Me is in the library too. Miranda carries this very book around New York with her, arguing about whether time travel could actually work, while notes start arriving that seem to know what happens next.