6 Degrees of A Wrinkle in Time

The first installment in Madeleine L'Engle's Time quintet, A Wrinkle in Time nearly went unpublished. Now an undisputed classic of fantasy, sci-fi and young adult literature, the book was rejected by more than 20 publishers before Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which has always focused primarily on books for adult readers, made an exception for L'Engle. Though the publisher's predictions for the book sales were modest, they were also wrong: 50 years later,... there are 10 million copies in print in the U.S. alone. The book's success surprised many who had wondered whether A Wrinkle in Time might be too difficult for children, a misconception that led L'Engle to define children's literature as books too challenging for adults. A Wrinkle in Time centers on Meg and Charles Wallace Murry, the misfit children of two brilliant scientists. Meg is a poor student and social outcast with a hidden talent for math. Charles Wallace is widely believed to be slow, but he's affected this appearance to conceal his extraordinary intelligence. The Murrys' father, a scientist engaged in top-secret government work, has been missing for more than a year, long enough for the rest of the town to become convinced that he's run off with another woman. Just when his absence is becoming too much, encounters with a curious woman named Mrs. Whatsit and a gifted peer named Calvin give the Murry children hope that their father is alive, if not quite well. Rescuing him requires folding time and space - and facing a dark force that threatens the universe itself.
In honor of the book's 50th anniversary, we've selected five titles to read in tandem with the Time quintet.

When asked what first inspired her to write, L'Engle frequently cited this L.M. Montgomery novel as a childhood favorite, claiming that Emily was a childhood hero who encouraged her to be an individual. In her book Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, L'Engle wrote that, while she also enjoyed Montgomery's more well-known Anne of Green Gables series, she especially adored Emily for her desire to be a writer, her rejection... of conformity, and because she had "a touch of second sight, that gift which allows us to peek for a moment at the world beyond ordinary space and time." A Wrinkle in Time's Charles Wallace shares this second sight with Emily, allowing him to understand concepts that seem just out of human reach, and causing his parents to believe he is an example of something new, a higher order of being.

In A Wrinkle in Time, the children travel from planet to planet by "tessering," folding time and space in order to lessen the leap between worlds. One of their first journeys brings them through a two-dimensional planet, a harrowing experience for the children that infuriates them while sending their otherworldly guides into peals of laughter. In an interview with Scholastic Press, L'Engle herself described what a flat planet might be like by... referencing Edwin Abbott Abbott's Flatland, a social satire from the late 19th century in which a literal square describes the difficulties of living in a two-dimensional world. In its enforced conformity - irregular shapes are essentially enslaved - Flatland also shares some of the dystopian elements of Camazotz, the planet where the Murrys' father is trapped in A Wrinkle in Time. The book is also considered prescient in its exploration of multiple dimensions, an idea central to the Time quintet.

The entire His Dark Materials trilogy complements the Time quintet in its combined use of fantasy and sci-fi as lenses for exploring humanist and religious themes, but The Subtle Knife is particularly parallel example. Just as Meg, Charles Wallace and Calvin must rescue the Murrys' scientist father from a failed government mission, Lyra and Will Parry must find Will's father, a physicist who vanished while studying dark matter. Both fathers figure into... a larger battle between good and evil, which both authors envision as an actual form of matter. The similarities don't end there, though: As is the unfortunate case with most books featuring fantastical creatures (with the notable exception of the Bible itself), both series have also been challenged for being "anti-Christian," a label Pullman might be more comfortable with than L'Engle - a lifelong Christian - was.

Both A Wrinkle in Time and When You Reach Me won Newberry Awards, but that's not all they have in common. As a child, Stead read and reread A Wrinkle in Time and once met Madeleine L'Engle in a bookstore. When You Reach Me's main character, 12-year-old Miranda, shares the author's fixation with the novel to the extent that her teacher is constantly leaving new books on her desk in an effort... to make her stop reading it. Stead was careful not to make Miranda's obsession with A Wrinkle in Time as a mere character trait, but rather to draw parallels between its plot and her own story. What begins as a realist novel about childhood in 1970s New York transforms into a science fictional mystery that owes a debt to L'Engle without mimicking her.

Though L'Engle was fascinated with math and science - especially particle physics - and often sought to borrow concepts for her books, she wasn't overly concerned with scientific accuracy. There may not be factual basis for the winged half-horse Mrs. Whatsit morphs into to ferry the children around, but L'Engle did base many of A Wrinkle in Time's concepts on real-life ideas. For instance, a Brown mathematics professor named Dr. Tom Banchoff... introduced L'Engle to the idea of the tesseract, a fictionalized version of which figures heavily into time travel in L'Engle's quintet. In Physics of the Impossible, string theory cofounder Michio Kaku discusses what fantastical future concepts are scientifically feasible. For instance, he argues that time travel is theoretically consistent the laws of quantum mechanics - but that, for the foreseeable future, we'll be experiencing it only in fiction.