A Wrinkle in Time

Madeleine L’Engle wrote the book A Wrinkle in Time about a tesseract, which is a wrinkle in time. The story is about a girl named Margaret Murry, who is called Meg, and her brother Charles Wallace, and a guy named Calvin, who is kind of Meg’s boyfriend and kind of not. On the back of the book, the Saturday Review says that the “theme is love.” I agree with that.

First of all, Meg loves her family, even though she thinks they are weird and they don’t really fit in. She loves her mom, who is beautiful, and her dad, who is a scientist, and her twin brothers, Sandy and Dennys, and even her baby brother, Charles Wallace, even though everybody thinks he’s dumb. Seriously, they think he can’t talk—not his family, but other people. The Murrys all love each other even though they are oddballs, and that’s important.

Second of all, Meg falls in love with Calvin O’Keefe, even though Charles Wallace at first thinks he’s a “big bug.” He is tall and skinny, with orange hair and pants that are too short, so I guess Charles Wallace was right about the big part and maybe the bug part to. At first, Meg and Calvin and Charles—none of them like each other very much, but then they run into these three witches named Mrs. Which, Mrs Who and Mrs. Whatsit. It’s off to another planet! That’s where the wrinkle in time comes in, and when they keep going to different planets, they fall in love. That’s because they were all oddballs on earth but they fit in out in space, so I guess part of the theme is that if you spend enough time with someone, you may fall in love.

Third of all, Meg loves this big mushy brain called IT. Seriously, that’s the way they spell it—I T! IT controls this one world where everybody has to be the same, and it’s the one world where Meg’s dad is held a prisoner, so she and Calvin and Charles Wallace have to go fight IT. At first, they can’t, but then Meg loves IT. I don’t mean she loves IT like she loves her family, or even like she loves Calvin, but like you love something that you wouldn’t normally.  Like if you had a dog that smelled bad and had only three legs, the way you’d love that dog. Anyway, Meg loves IT, and that’s how she beats IT and saves her dad.

So in conclusion, A Wrinkle in Time is a book about the theme of love—the kind of love you have for your family, the kind you have for a basketball- player boyfriend, and the kind you have for a three-legged dog. That’s three kinds of love, and there are all sorts of other kinds of love in the world. People should read this book so that they learn how to love. All you need is love. That’s the theme, and it relates to life because everybody needs somebody to love.