|Science Fantasy| - Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time" - Book Review

With the film adaptation of this book coming out in literally a couple of hours, I grabbed the book and just gave it a go. When I heard this book was odd, I didn't know what critics meant with "odd". But they're totally right! There is a lot of nonsense, but nonsense which you get used to and helps you move on with the story.  

It starts off normal and then it slowly becomes even more strange. It's like a roller coaster that keeps going up and the higher it goes the more extreme the plot gets. 

 Our protagonist is a young girl who's bullied at school who also has to deal with the disappearance of her father. She has an odd 5-year old brother who is maybe too smart for his age and can sometimes tell exactly what his sister is thinking of. An old lady comes over to their house on a stormy night and makes their mother faint by saying a weird comment: "there is such a thing as a tesseract". A couple chapters later, some new characters are introduced and you're reading about three kids flying on a centaur in the planet Uriel on a quest to save the planet Earth from "The Thing", which is a dark cloud that is supposed to represent evil.

  

Even with this whole turn of events, L'Engle make the readers still be interested in reading what's going to happen next. It doesn't stop the reader because nothing makes sense, it does the opposite and gives you enough whimsy explanation to keep on reading. I was, in fact, left with some questions (Why did this happen? What about this person? When did you have the time to do this? And so on) but in the end, realistic scenarios and explanations to make you understand what happens in this book would've not given you the same kind of entertainment. It was a peculiar story and I ate this book up just out of my own curiosity for what would happen next. 

The protagonist Meg had a really good character development throughout the book and it was nice to see her believe in herself more and more as the story progressed. Specially by the end, her development is pretty much what gets to put an end to the conflict of the story.  

It ended up being a pleasant experience to read a book so different from the usual "norm". Yes, it was odd. But it didn't stop me from feeling interested in the story, the setting, nor its characters: The three elder ladies where all sweet, kind and different. Same goes with the three children. They all had that specialty to them and you wanted to know what other wacky thing they were going to stumble upon. And its antagonist was a nice fit for all the craziness in the book. Someone (Or maybe something...?) that wanted control of anything and everything and for all to act the same at every second of every minute of every hour. 

It was a good a change from the typical, common sense plots I choose to read and starting this with absolutely no idea besides the trailer to its upcoming adaption. It's definitely something that I'd have to start doing more often. Even if the book might sound weird, don't judge it until you read it for yourself!