A most popular and original book is A Wrinkle in Time. The book sparkles with the author's vitality and imagination and proceeds at a fast pace with recognizable character types. Her contributions are ingenious but not deep. The climactic scene in which Meg stands crying before Charles Wallace bothers me for two reasons. First of all, I find it hard to understand why she could not have done this before; secondly, if Mrs. Whatsit could tesser her and Charles Wallace away from IT, why couldn't s...

Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time is a splendid fantasy; … it seldom violates reality. The Murry family relationships, Calvin's relationship to his parents, and Meg's relation to school authorities and the community, as well as the character portraits, are probable and realistic. Envy of the Murrys, gossip about the supposedly runaway father-husband, malice, selfishness, and even Charles Wallace's arrogance, are unflinchingly presented. Tesseracting, a seemingly...

A Wrinkle in Time [is] a fantasy which uses many of the devices of science fiction, but which does not rely on its machinery to produce story. Space and time fantasy can have fully developed character, and yet retain the ingenuity we find in science fiction. Even though the characters of A Wrinkle in Time have special mental powers, they do not lose their humanness. Father, the brilliant scientist, through sheer human weariness has lost his fight with IT, the huge, disembodied brain. Meg struggles to hold b...

The most ambitious of American SF stories for young people is Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time…. Heroine Meg Murry, who wears spectacles and has braces on her teeth, sets off with precocious small brother Charles and friend Calvin O'Keefe to rescue her scientist father from the grip of IT; a great brain that controls the lives of the zombie population of a planet called Camazotz. The power of love and the help of three witches who appear also to be angels enable Meg to trium...

The qualities that made A Wrinkle in Time popular are all [in The Arm of the Starfish], though the plot and characters are kept under better control. At first the story seems a cloak-and-dagger affair: it teeters on the edge of melodrama, becomes mystical in tone, and, if you read the note in the front matter, appears also to be science fiction. There is a "message," which is more skilfully presented than that of the former book. The characters are alive and possible—including the Jesus...