The clock ticks, time bends, space shifts, and Oprah is the planet-hopping tour guide. Meg Murry has to save the world and goes out in the universe to slay the darkness. The story also says a lot about slaying our own dragons and does not talk down to its readers, believing them able to grasp the difficult concepts of mathematics, love and the battle between good and evil.
Re-read the novel before the movie, starring Oprah, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and more, hits the cinemas on March 9th. Madeleine L’Engle’s most famous novel, and certainly one of her most profound and imaginative, begins on a dark and stormy night, as Meg Murry, an overdramatic teenager with ‘major issues’, is sitting and sulking in her room.
Meg, a high-school girl, is homely and awkward, but loving, troubled by personal insecurities and concern for her father, who has been missing for over a year. Meg who is transported on an adventure through time and space with her younger brother Charles Wallace and her friend Calvin O’Keefe to rescue her father, a gifted scientist, from the evil forces that hold him prisoner on another planet.
Then Mrs. Whatsit arrives at the Murry house looking like an eccentric tramp, but she is actually a celestial creature with the ability to read Meg’s thoughts. She startles Meg’s mother by reassuring her of the existence of a tesseract–a sort of “wrinkle” in space and time.
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