moving to outside.ofa.dog reviewed A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle (Time quintet)
Review of 'A Wrinkle in Time' on 'LibraryThing'
2 stars
I think I see why this is such an important book to many of my friends, but I didn't get on well with it. Part of the problem is definitely that I'm reading it as an adult and it's clearly intended for a significantly younger audience than the YA novels I've enjoyed over the past few years. But there's other stuff too.
The Meg-Calvin relationship developed without ever developing - like it was just inevitable that these two would have a super gender role normative relationship so there was no need to bother with exposition of it - and felt like it undermined her agency. The weirdly formal tone of most of the dialogue. The simplicity of "evil" in the book, which when its content was explored at all just felt like red scare propaganda, as if 1962 America didn't have its conformist, deindividuated suburbia. The occasional bursts of god-talk …
I think I see why this is such an important book to many of my friends, but I didn't get on well with it. Part of the problem is definitely that I'm reading it as an adult and it's clearly intended for a significantly younger audience than the YA novels I've enjoyed over the past few years. But there's other stuff too.
The Meg-Calvin relationship developed without ever developing - like it was just inevitable that these two would have a super gender role normative relationship so there was no need to bother with exposition of it - and felt like it undermined her agency. The weirdly formal tone of most of the dialogue. The simplicity of "evil" in the book, which when its content was explored at all just felt like red scare propaganda, as if 1962 America didn't have its conformist, deindividuated suburbia. The occasional bursts of god-talk in a story that religion doesn't seem to fit into. The way the beloved father figure keeps resorting to authoritarian responses to children who know things he doesn't.
Maybe this just hasn't aged well? Or maybe it's just not a book for me.
