In Madeleine L'Engle's A WRINKLE IN TIME, everything seems stacked against Meg Murray and her younger brother Charles Wallace. The townsfolk think Meg is hotheaded and dense, Charles Wallace downright dumb; and to make everything worse, they think their father, a brilliant and world-renowned scientist, has run off on their beautiful and equally as brilliant scientist mother. Only their twin brothers, Sandy and Dennys, seem to be adapting well to living in the family's vacation home year round and going to the village school.

Their father, who had been experimenting with time travel at the time of his disappearance, has actually vanished into the fifth dimension, or tesseract. The children, who aren't entirely convinced that alternate dimensions exist, soon find themselves careening across time and space in the company of three very eccentric and otherworldly women. Together, Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which, who are really their guardian angels, transport Meg, Charles Wallace, and their neighbor, Calvin OKeefe, to the planet Camazotz. There they discover a repressed and totally conformist society controlled by the evil doings of a disembodied brain called IT, which is darkening the cosmos, one planet at a time. This same brain has also imprisoned their father for his freethinking. Can they resist IT's hypnotic powers and rescue their father, or will they succumb and remain forever trapped in a wrinkle in time?

The winner of the 1963 Newbery Medal, A WRINKLE IN TIME combines fantasy, theology, and the mysteries of science to tell a fascinating story of time travel.

   --- Reviewed by Tammy L. Currier

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