Then
My fourth-grade teacher read the first chapter aloud to us and I went home and finished the whole thing in three days. I didn’t fully understand the tesseract. I didn’t understand what Mrs. Whatsit was. I understood that Meg Murry was awkward and angry and smart and that her father was missing and that she was going to find him, and that was enough.
Meg was the first fictional character I’d encountered who was explicitly, textually awkward — not in a cute way, not in a way that got resolved by chapter three, but in a real, ongoing, sometimes self-destructive way. She felt true to me in a way I didn’t have language for yet.
Now
L’Engle was doing so many things at once, and I catch more of them every time I return. The physics is real physics, genuinely explained — the tesseract is the four-dimensional analogue of a cube, and the book treats its young readers as capable of grappling with that. The theology is there too, quietly, not imposed. The darkness that threatens the universe is conformity itself, IT’s monstrous sameness.
What I notice now is how the love in this book works. It’s not romantic love — it’s family love, stubborn and specific and world-saving. Meg doesn’t defeat IT through cleverness or power. She defeats it through loving Charles Wallace in particular, this specific annoying brilliant little brother. That felt abstract at nine. It feels like the whole point now.
Got a lovely paperback reprint with the original Madeleine L’Engle-approved cover art. Some things should be kept.