A Wrinkle In Time

I love fall.

Seriously. It’s my favorite season. The cozy sweaters, the hot drinks, early mornings with frost on the ground, pumpkins, candles, and, of course, Halloween. Does it get any better than that? The days are shorter, the summer allergies are gone, and everyone is either buying or being annoyed about pumpkin spice lattes.

Bliss.

Since I have never actually tried a pumpkin spice latte, and, oddly enough, I don’t usually dress up for Halloween, I have my own fall rituals that I like to honor. Many of them include chopping a ridiculous amount of wood to heat my tiny house and collecting fallen acorns to store in my fridge through the winter. (I know what you’re thinking, but it is NOT weird. It’s actually very cool, as you can see here.)

Another reason I love fall is the rainy, misty days with nothing to do but light a fire in the wood stove and curl up on the couch with a cup of tea and a good book. I have a list of books that are my favorites to pull out during the fall. Most of them are detective stories, a few horror novels, and of course, A Wrinkle in Time.

This book has been one of my favorites for a long, long time. Meg Murry and her wild moods, her glasses, and her mouth full of braces was, to me, a reflection of myself. I ran across this book at much that same awkward age, and found someone who felt as passionately as I did, and yet struggled to express it properly, exactly as I did.

Immediately, I was hooked.

Meg and her brother Charles Wallace are the centerpieces of this story, both of them whisked into an adventure that neither of them, despite being the prodigy children of two famous scientists, really understands. The story begins with their father, a physicist who was working on a classified project for the government—just before he disappeared. Meg’s whole family is caught in the backlash of gossip and rumors about her absent parent, but she refuses to believe that he is dead, or that he abandoned them. He’ll return.

She just doesn’t know when.

Then, one dark and stormy night, an old woman appears—quite from nowhere—on their doorstep, and informs Mrs. Murry over a tuna fish sandwich that there is such a thing as a tesseract.

These unaccountable words set in motion an incredible journey across space and time, a journey that will test Meg’s mind and heart beyond what she imagines they are capable of. And—despite the intelligence and otherworldly powers of her companions—it is Meg’s heart and her love for her father, her brother, Charles Wallace, and her own discovery of herself that will pave the path home.

A Wrinkle in Time is a powerful and spellbinding masterpiece. I would recommend it to readers of every age, especially as summer ends and autumn blows in. I hope you enjoy it every bit as much as I did!

“Wild nights are my glory,” Mrs. Whatsit said. “I just got caught in a down draft and blown off course.”