Mourning Madeline
September 10th, 2007 by Kathleen Bolton
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Madeline L’Engle has died.
Like every American 5th grader, I was forced to read A Wrinkle in Time, and I hated it. Oh sure, the tesseracts–folded time–was cool, but as a dorky 11-year-old kid, I didn’t get how a disembodied brain called IT could cover the world in “darkness” and I thought that the resolution of Meg loving her little brother Charles so much she foils universal evil was ridiculous, because my own little brother was so thoroughly loathsome I would have left him on Camazotz.
But when my own daughter brought home Wrinkle for her forced march through the Newbery Award-winning novel, I decided to revisit it and find out what made it so great.
Instantly, the simplicity and power of her language gripped me hard. But something about Wrinkle was so familiar….
Oh yes. It was there buried in Harry Potter and His Dark Materials and more novels than I can count. L’Engle intersected the themes of science and mysticism and the power of love within a children’s novel in a highly sophisticated way, so much so that novelists are still mining that nugget of storytelling truth.
I asked my daughter if she liked A Wrinkle in Time. No, she said. She thought it was a rip-off of Harry Potter.
I set her straight. But I don’t think she believed me.
I’m so glad L’Engle persisted through 26 rejections to get A Wrinkle in Time published. Literature is a much poorer place without her.
I loved A WRINKLE IN TIME the first time I read it. Now my oldest is enjoying the rest of L’Engle’s books. I hope to catch up on them sometime despite the staggering TBR list.
Here’s a quote from L’Engle I particularly enjoy as a writer.
“In my dreams, I never have an age,” she said. “I never write for any age group in mind. … When you underestimate your audience, you’re cutting yourself off from your best work.”
Also, sorry for not having visited in so long. Summer got so crazy with the kids home I barely had time to visit my own blog let alone any others. Now back to writing.
Nice to see you back, Elena! No worries, we understand the ebb and flow of life.
when i was in seventh grade, i was in the WORST class, meaning, several of the boys in this class were horrid. i can still remember this poor teacher coming in to class every day, the look of fear and dread plastering her pale face. she obviously had to gird her loins to show up. She almost lost it completely when a boy named peter stuck a paperclip into an electric plug. The smoke and flash were bad enough, and luckily, nothing happened to peter. but it took ten years off that poor woman’s life. But one day, she came into class and said there was a new book that had just been published, She’d read it over the weekend and loved it, and she asked if we’d be interested in her reading it aloud to us. The whole class said yes (anything to avoid to usual classroom work) and for a week, we, the worst 7th grade class, sat mesmerized by every word in A Wrinkle In Time. And i have adored Madeline L’Engle ever since. And I may have forgotten that teacher’s name, but I have never forgotten her never-ending gift to me and that undeserving class.
We were assigned A WRINKLE IN TIME back in the fourth grade, but the thing never made a damn lick of sense to my lateral mind. I’ve been meaning to go back and reread ever since…
Aww Thea, that’s a sweet memory!
Catie, it’s really worth reading again as an adult, and it’s a quickie too. You won’t be wasting an afternoon at all on it.