RIP Madeline L'Engel
About a month or so back I was trying to figure out what exactly made me a geek. It wasn't "Star Wars"; my dad took me to the 1982 re-release and I was so terrified by Darth Vader that he had to take me home. It wasn't "Star Trek"; when I tried to watch "Wrath of Khan" a couple years later, I was so revolted by the worms-in-the-ear sequence that I didn't see another movie in the theater for seven years. It wasn't until I heard about Madeline L'Engel's death last week that I realized: "A Wrinkle in Time" was what did it.
I can't really say it any better than this fine appreciation piece in the Washington Post, so I'll let them speak for me:
"A Wrinkle in Time" was not the sort of book you were assigned in school; with its New Testament quotations and witchy supporting characters it was at once too Christian and too blasphemous. It was the sort of book you discovered on your own ... Meg's awkwardness, her anger, her imperfections were too intensely private, too attuned to your own gangly self-loathing ... Woven through every story line: the unfailing message to be yourself, delivered not in a syrupy parental way but in a jarring and often scary one.
At least one part of that was untrue for me: I was introduced to the book by my third-grade teacher, who read it to the class. In the early afternoon, where our attention would surely have been lost if she had tried to bludgeon us with math or phonics, she instead read L'Engel to us aloud for about an hour. The class, by and large, loved it: we thought we were too old to be read to, but "Wrinkle" was just far enough over our heads that we felt more mature by experiencing it.
In retrospect, it amazes me that no parents complained or stopped the reading. The book is maybe a little too mature for third-graders, and Kansas probably would not have gone for it even if we had been in high school (for its odd takes on science and mysticism, "Wrinkle" has been one of the most-often-banned books from public libraries for years). I doubt any third grader in the country would have L'Engel read to them today. I consider myself one of the lucky ones.
I can't really say it any better than this fine appreciation piece in the Washington Post, so I'll let them speak for me:
"A Wrinkle in Time" was not the sort of book you were assigned in school; with its New Testament quotations and witchy supporting characters it was at once too Christian and too blasphemous. It was the sort of book you discovered on your own ... Meg's awkwardness, her anger, her imperfections were too intensely private, too attuned to your own gangly self-loathing ... Woven through every story line: the unfailing message to be yourself, delivered not in a syrupy parental way but in a jarring and often scary one.
At least one part of that was untrue for me: I was introduced to the book by my third-grade teacher, who read it to the class. In the early afternoon, where our attention would surely have been lost if she had tried to bludgeon us with math or phonics, she instead read L'Engel to us aloud for about an hour. The class, by and large, loved it: we thought we were too old to be read to, but "Wrinkle" was just far enough over our heads that we felt more mature by experiencing it.
In retrospect, it amazes me that no parents complained or stopped the reading. The book is maybe a little too mature for third-graders, and Kansas probably would not have gone for it even if we had been in high school (for its odd takes on science and mysticism, "Wrinkle" has been one of the most-often-banned books from public libraries for years). I doubt any third grader in the country would have L'Engel read to them today. I consider myself one of the lucky ones.