Note that I bought this book and now I own it.

6/10, I enjoyed this one, but there were issues in the book that forced me to lower the rating of it to 3 stars. I didn't connect to any of the characters within the book, and I disliked some of them and found others rather bizarre. Meg wasn't very likable in the book, since she kept whining and shouting, I wonder how old she is. Charles, Meg's younger brother, wasn't any better, because he was just a caricature, he is just smarter than his contemporaries, got brainwashed by IT and that's it. Ms Who and Ms Which were very bizarre, since one of them hissed and dragged her words when she spoke, and the other one kept quoting philosophers in 7 different languages (English, Latin, Greek, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese), who knew she could be so smart speaking all of them like that, not many people can do that.

The dystopian world called Camazotz wasn't well built, because it just felt like The Giver since everything was perfect and all the people there were emotionless and followed IT (which is just a giant brain), and that's it. The ending was convenient because Meg saved her brother by defeating IT with the power of love, how trite and banal. If you want a better dystopian novel, try The Giver, or 1984. ( )

Reread this today. I had already given it five stars based on the memory of loving it when I was a child. I'll let the five stars stand, but I am a little conflicted. There is a lot going on here. It's kinda classical philosophyish/new-agey and clearly Christian-oriented at the same time. And it's chock-full of literary devices I can see for what they are now that I am old (not a bad thing to be full of, it's just interesting to recognize them now.)

I am eager to talk to my friend Barb about this book, given that she loved it enough to name her daughter Meg. To my mind, at least in this first book, Meg Murray is not nearly as interesting a character as her real life namesake has become. I do like book-Meg, but I am curious about the fact that she made such an impression. All my life as I remembered loving this series of books, I completely forgot all about Meg and mostly just remembered Charles Wallace and, even more-so, the Mrs. Trio.

( )

Since this classic YA science fiction book was written in 1962, there probably isn't anything to add to the conversation about it. Except to wonder why someone who was a YA at the time has never read it before. The author is able to give the reader something of a sense of what it might be like to tesseract through time and space, while encountering the Black Thing. And that is no easy task!

The 2007 edition has Madeleine L'Engle's acceptance speech when she was presented with the John Newberry Metal in 1963. Her speech offers inspiring commentary on what a work of fiction can do to bring fire to enlighten the darkness, as she says in the last line of the speech. ( )

My late-summer reading list took a turn when political and natural disasters overwhelmed. Returning to the miracle of imagination—even the strange characters of the the Misses, the dark shadow, and the disembodied brain—felt like a relief.

Looking forward to the feature film release next March. ( )

I loved this so much. I saw the movie first, never had read it before. The movie was so magical that I went searching for the book right away. The book was so much better. I am looking forward to reading the rest of the series. ( )