Author: Madeleine L'Engle
Publisher: Macmillan
Rating: WARTY!
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You know when you visit an author's website and the website advertises itself with a novel which was published over a half century ago: Madeleine L'Engle's Website - Author of A Wrinkle in Time, that something's rotten in the state of Uriel. If that's not enough to warn you off, there's always the Newbery medal sticker, there to dissuade would-be readers like a health warning on a pack of cigarettes. That's the experience I had with this 'classic'.
The main character, Meg Murray is a thirteen-year-old with some issues. She's part of a highly improbable family where the father is absent and the children are all precocious and advanced beyond their years. The mother's only characteristic seems to be that she's "beautiful' although why that's important or even relevant is never explained. She's also a scientist, but this evidently is less of a feature than her skin. Meg has a younger brother named Charles who is way smarter than he should be for his age. She has two younger twin brothers as well, Sandy and Dennys.
This novel actually starts with the classic line from Edward George Bulwer-Lytton's novel Paul Clifford published in 1830: "It was a dark and stormy night." Meg is a nervous Nellie when it comes to storms, and also given to romanticizing poorly understood events out of all rational proportion. This neighbor Mrs Whatsit becomes a thieving dangerous "tramp" (tramp used here in the sense of 'hobo', not 'loose woman')
Meg's mom seems to have no problem whatsoever when her kids, Meg, and the five-year-old, wander the house in the middle of the night making themselves cups of cocoa or drinking milk. In fact, she joins them, and the hell with school in the morning. Isn't that beautiful? It’s at this time that Meg learns of the tesseract, but mom, who reacted strongly to its mention, refuses to explain what it is, because now she's all concerned about Meg getting to school after her sleepless night.
Making up intelligent names doesn’t seem to be L'Engle's strong point; thus, another character is named Mrs Who, and another, Mrs Which. It is these three who offer to help Meg find her father, although why they offer this to Meg and not to Meg's mom is a mystery.
The only humor in the novel is the poor writing, which evidently isn't bad enough to make old Newbery turn in his grave such as this ambiguous phrase: "Meg made her bed and hurried after it." I wasn't sure if she took so long to make the bed that she had to rush through everything else because she was out of time, or if the bed had left the building Elvis-style, and Meg was hastily following. I suppose it could have been that she hurried out after the cat which had left the room earlier, but that's just a wild guess!
When reached the part about magical centaurs, I simply put the novel down and walked away. I couldn't stand to read any more of this tedious and poorly written drivel.
