A Wrinkle in Time

By Madeleine L'Engle

Words from the achiever

“I remember in fourth grade we had this wonderful contest — there was some prize — whoever could read the most Newbery Award winners in a year. I didn’t end up winning. I think I read like 30 Newbery Award winners that year, but somebody else read more. The standout there is the old classic that I think so many people have read and enjoyed, A Wrinkle in Time, and I just remember loving that book. I was always a big fan of science fiction — even from when I was in elementary school, reading various things and loved, of course, The Hobbit and Tolkien’s trilogy that follows on from that. This little town where my grandfather lived — where I spent my time in the summer — had a tiny little Andrew Carnegie-style library where all the books had been donated from the local citizens. This was a very small library, but it had an extensive science fiction collection, because it just so happened one of the residents of this 3,000-person town had been a science fiction fan, and donated their whole collection. And that started a love affair for me with people like Heinlein and Asimov and all the well-known science fiction authors that persists to this day.”

About the book

In this Newbery Award-winning young people’s classic, three young misfits, guided by three mysterious old women, travel through space and time to battle a cosmic evil.

“Well, the fifth dimension’s a tesseract. You add that to the other four dimensions and you can travel through space without having to go the long way around. In other words, to put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.”