Slaughtering Sacred Cows: A Wrinkle in Time

Recently, I chatted with a friend about Harriet The Spy, a book that I was overjoyed to discover was even better than I had remembered.

But there are some books that you go back to, thinking that as certified "classics" they're sure to stand the test of time, and you realize that kid-you must have been much less discriminating than adult-you has become.

I'm sorry to have to say it, but that's what happened with A Wrinkle in Time.

I had only the vaguest memories of the book, and they were mainly that it was very complicated. I think I must have originally picked it up around the age of 7 or 8, and it was just over my head; jumping through space-time with a 5-year-old who speaks like an olde tyme BBC production was lost on me...

...as was the incredibly heavy-handed moralizing.

I know the idea of teaching a moral lesson in kid's lit isn't new; in fact for many people it's one of the many "musts" of children's stories. But the incredibly overt strain of indoctrination that permeates certain books--the Narnia series is the other prime example I can think of--is just so hard to ignore as a grown-up.

Rereading this felt like when I read Ayn Rand again at 20. At 14, it seemed SO PROFOUND. Being capable of picking up on an actual theme in a book--one which was intended, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer--made me feel so smart that I thought I liked Rand's writing.

When I revisited it with a formed brain, it looked more like what it was: very thinly-veiled propaganda being spouted by wooden characters.

At least Madeline L'Engle wasn't a Randian...but she was clearly a devout Christian, and the ways in which her pet philosophy continually crops up in this book (and presumably the later titles in the series, none of which I'll be rereading) become just as ham-handed by the end.

That wasn't even my only issue with the book--L'Engle's 14-year old protagonist reads like a young 10-year-old, which is always a pet-peeve for me, and her main character traits seem to be stubbornness and wanting to hold hands, making her remarkably 2-dimensional for a book that explores a fifth one--it's just my most prominent gripe.

It's not even the content of the philosophy that's problematic, it's the way it's deployed: SO OBVIOUSLY. Am I the only one who just can't get behind this book? Have I just alienated everyone ever by calling a spade a would-be-indoctrination-manual?