A Wrinkle in Time was one of the few books I was allowed to read as a kid. I was raised in a strict religious home and not a lot of books made the cut—particularly classics. But the Little House series did and so did A Wrinkle in Time.
I was eleven when I first read A Wrinkle in Time and it was unlike anything I had ever encountered before. It was spooky and intelligent. The author Madeline L’Engle had a peculiar rhythm to her sentences and they were off putting and odd to me. But the unusual flow in her sentences matched the unsettling story of the Meg Murray, a young girl with a missing father. He vanishes during scientific work on a mysterious government project called a tesseract and Meg must journey through space and time to find him.
The book was rejected 26 times by different publishing houses before its eventual acceptance. It was finally published in 1962, to great success, including winning the Newbury Award. Among the reasons listed for its initial rejection rejection were that the children’s novel was “too different,” and worse that it “dealt overtly with the problem of evil” and wasn’t fit for children. L’Engle felt that another cause of rejection was that it was a science-fiction novel with a female protagonist, something almost unheard of at that time.
A Wrinkle in Time has been in continuous print since its publication and Variety has just announced that Frozen’s co-director Jennifer Lee is writing a film adaptation of the book for Disney. The move follows Disney’s current trend of producing films centered on female protagonists, such as Frozen and Maleficent.
No director is currently attached to the project and multiple attempts to turn the book into a film have failed in the past. But Lee, part of Disney’s story trust, stated that A Wrinkle in Time was her favorite childhood book and that “she impressed Disney’s executives with her take on the story.” It’s about time someone turned this brilliant and unusual children’s novel into a movie. I fell in love with Meg’s time travels as a child and as an adult, I can’t wait to see Meg go on her startling “tesseract” adventures once more- this time on the big screen
Cat, have you read When You Reach Me by Stead? It won the Newbery a few years ago, is most excellent, and a must-read for those of us who loved Wrinkle in Time
Anne- I did read that and I loved it! Now that you reminded me, I’m going to have to read it again. It’s been too long.
For me, I have read it two times, and it was worth the task