Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wizened look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads 'A Wrinkle In Time', Madeleine L'Engle's 1962 novel of Meg Murry, who is too young to have wrinkles.

It was a dark and stormy night.

If I had my way, none of us would have to read this review at all. Instead, we'd join hands, hear a great dark thunderclap, and be whisked off to a rambling house in the country, where we'd view odd things bubbling in a lab with a stone floor, then eat limburger-and-cream-cheese sandwiches while swinging our legs at the kitchen table. We'd sidestep for a moment onto a planet inhabited by gentle gray creatures with dents for eyes, then be inserted into some mitochondria. We battle for the soul of Madoc /Maddox, and eat small crayfish with our lesbian kind-of aunt who insisted on calling us our full name (Polyhymnia). We'd hop on a freighter and solve a mystery, then go to boarding school in Switzerland. We would make a brief detour on the Upper West Side by way of Portugal, and be concerned with cell regeneration in starfish. We'd be smacked on the ass by a dolphin. Most important, whatever happened, we'd know we could get through it—because we are creatures that can love.

GOD, HOW MUCH DOES IT KILL ME THAT WE CAN'T DO THOSE THINGS, ESPECIALLY THE DOLPHIN PART! But, as Mrs. Who would have us recall Dante saying, Come t'e picciol fallow amaro morso! (What grievous pain a little fault doth give thee!) For here we are finally, located at the miraculous creation of Meg Murry (Madeleine L'Engle: Das Werk lobt den Meister! The work proves the craftsman!). Meg, the first heroine to endear herself to the reader by way of atom rearrangement.

For those readers who don't know—and I can't imagine there are many, but just for the record—A Wrinkle in Time is the story of Meg Murry—bespectacled, easily angered, brilliant at math—the first in a line of L'Engle heroines who flit across the boundaries of space and time, even more flummoxed by adolescence than they are by being whipsawed across the universe. (Which they are generally, just to complicate things, in the process of saving.) In AWIT, Meg, joined by her neighbor (and future husbs!!!) Calvin O'Keefe and her quietly remarkable younger brother Charles Wallace, hop-stops her way through a number of only occasionally hospitable galaxies, searching for her father in the shadow of the Dark Thing, the shadow of evil threatening to overtake Earth, and all of creation.

And that's it for those of you who haven't read the book. (Just stab me in the eye; it's less painful.) For the rest, first off, I am embarrassed to say that, swooning over memories of red-tinged, Sloppy Joe brains and calm, fragrant creatures with dents for eyes (Aunt Beast!), I had entirely forgotten that, when we first come across the studious, brilliant, Murray family, they—and Meg in particular—are in somewhat of a crisis. Not only has Meg just gotten into an enormous fight, black eye included, on the way home from school with some boys teasing her about her “dumb baby brother,” but her father is missing—a fact which the town is only too happy to snidely remind her of. Here's Meg with her school principal, sullenly hating life in the hall:

"Meg, don't you think you'd make a better adjustment to life if you faced facts?"
"I do face facts," Meg said. "They're lots easier to face than people, I can tell you."
"Then why don't you face facts about your father?"
"You leave my father out of it!" Meg shouted.
"Stop bellowing," Mr. Jenkins said sharply. "Do you want the entire school to hear you?"
"So what?" Meg demanded. “I'm not ashamed of anything I'm saying. Are you?"

Am I the only one who'd forgotten that Meg has a) a bad attitude and b) is therefore, as yet unbeknownst to her, kind of a badass? Unfortunately for Meg, at that age, being a badass feels closer to, “I hate myself and would like to die." As the novel begins, alone in the bathroom, Meg tells her cat, "Just be glad you're a kitten and not a monster like me," then looks in the mirror and makes “a horrible face, baring a mouthful of teeth covered with braces.”

The problem for Meg is that, like Vicky Austin, she is surrounded by people who know exactly who they are. First are her younger brothers: “The twins didn't have any problems....They were strong and fast runners and good at games, and when cracks were made about anybody in the Murry family, they weren't made about Sandy and Dennys.” Then there's her mother, who's both beautiful, kind, and a brilliant scientist. (Meg snorts at the idea her mother's looks or accomplishments are ordinary, although her mother, also enragingly modest, assures her they are.) Youngest brother Charles Wallace may have issues on the vast social stage of their country town ("Thinking I'm a moron gives people something to be smug about"), but only because being brilliant, psychic and self-assured before reaching 5 feet never plays well on the playground. (FYI, Charles Wallace is the only preternaturally wise child I've ever been able to stand, in literature. Maybe that's why I can't stand the other ones—they're NOT Charles Wallace.) Even their neighbor Calvin O'Keefe, who Meg thinks of only as a popular, well-adjusted basketball player, only pretends to be—he, like Charles, is both bright and highly attuned to unseen currents.

Meg, on the other hand, is all flyaway hair, braces, irritation and uncertainty—not ordinary enough to be popular in school, but not quite the extraordinary being Charles Wallace is. (As Charles Wallace puts it, "Meg has it tough. She's not really one thing or the other.") When she's hears someone say, "The two boys seem to be nice, regular children, but that unattractive girl and the baby boy certainly aren't all there," there's no more coherent rejoinder than her flying fists.

But Calvin O'Keefe, whose unabashed affection for Meg marks the beginning of her transformation, dispatches this whole line of inquiry neatly. "Oh, for crying out loud," Calvin said, "you're Meg, aren't you? Come on and let's go for a walk."

I'm sorry. I'm going to need to just swoon for one second over Calvin:

Tall he certainly was, and skinny. His bony wrists stuck out of the sleeves of his blue sweater; his worn corduroy trousers were three inches too short. He had orange hair that needed cutting and the appropriate freckles to go with it. His eyes were an oddly bright blue.

Loving. Him. LOVING HIM! (Zach and Adam, Shmach and Adam.) Anyway, enough backstory. As you know, Calvin has been brought on the scene at the request of Mrs. Who, one of three mysterious old women who have arrived in order to help the Murrys retrieve their father, who has not, as the family knows perfectly well, gone on the lam with a beautiful woman, but obviously been stuck in a high-tech jail on a galaxy far, far away. But in order to get there, they are going to have perform the act that landed Professor Murry in trouble in the first place—engaging in a tesseract. (Is the tesseract the object or action? Whatever.) As Mrs. Whatsit unhelpfully explains, "Oh, we don't travel at the speed of anything....We tesser. Or you might say, we wrinkle."

I'm going to need some visuals on that! Okay, imagine an ant crawling on a piece of string. Now, imagine the string is a skirt!

Swiftly Mrs. Who brought her hands, still holding the skirt, together. "Now, you see," Mrs. Whatsit said. "He would be there, without that long trip. That is how we travel."

Exactly! Sort of. Charles Wallace begins to quiz Meg on dimensions, just to bring the reader even further up to speed. Meg, if the first dimension is a line, the second a square, the third a three-dimensional square in which we live, then what's the fourth dimension?

"Well, I guess if you want to put it into mathematical terms you'd square the square. But you can't take a pencil and draw it the way you can the first three. I know it's got something to do with Einstein and time. I guess maybe you can call the fourth dimension Time."

That great whooshing sound you hear is the noise of 10 million readers deciding to just go ahead and be English majors. In any case, having tesseracted, 5th dimension style, of course, Meg's father is not simply lost—he is imprisoned by the great brain of the Dark Thing, a shadow stretching over the entire universe that is also starting to creep over Earth, the children are horrified to see. And in order to release him, the children are going to have to travel to Camazotz, where he's being held, the planet where the forces of evil have coalesced into a dreadful reign of conformity:

Then the doors of all the houses opened simultaneously, and out came women like a role of paper dolls. The print of their dresses was different, but they all gave the appearanceof being the same. Each woman stood on the steps of her house. Each clapped. Each child with the ball caught the ball. Each child with the skipping rope folded the rope. Each child turned and walked into the house. The doors clicked shut behind them.

What's fascinating about L'Engle is how in her world, courageous action is never simply swashbuckling, and it's unlikely anyone but a bookworm who couldn't conform if she tried could stand up against the forces of evil. In the first few chapters of the book, the reader is introduced, in no particular order, e=mc2, megaparsecs, Peru, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Euripides, Delille, and a host of other terms with which your average 12-year-old is rarely familiar. As the children watch the Dark Thing encircle their planet, they are relieved to realize that there have been heroes fighting against it throughout history, heroes they can name: Jesus, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Pasteur, and Madame Curie and Einstein. The children resist being hypnotized by the forceful brain, IT, holding their father captive by reciting the periodic table, the Declaration of Independence, and doing the square roots of odd numbers. And when Charles Wallace is fully pulled into the brain of IT, Meg holds it off on her own simply by having an insight:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident!" she shouted, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

As she cried out the worlds she felt a mind moving in on her own, felt IT seizing, squeezing her brain. Then she realized that Charles Wallace was speaking, or being spoken through by IT.

"But that's exactly what we have on Camazots. Complete equality. Everybody exactly alike."

For a moment her brain reeled with confusion. Then came a moment of blazing truth. "No!" she cried triumphantly. "Like and equal are not the same thing at all!"

This is absolutely apropos, since Meg, Charles and Calvin, are, of course, not like their peers, and not like the world in which they live—but they are far more than equal, if it comes to that. And is this regard, Mrs. Who has also provided Meg with a far more important weapon against IT, one that not even Calvin or Charles Wallace have:

"My faults!" Meg cried.

"Your faults."

"But I'm always trying to get rid of my faults!"

What were her greatest faults? Anger, impatience, stubbornness. Yes, it was to her faults that she turned to save herself now.

And because she's able to resist IT for long enough out of pure orneriness, she's able to remember what it is that she has that those in conformity, both at home and on Camazotz, can never take away from her:

Her own Charles Wallace, the child for whom she had come back to Camazotz, to IT, the baby who was so much more than she was, and who was yet so utterly vulnerable.

She could love Charles Wallace.

Charles. Charles, I love you. My baby brother who always takes care of me. Come back to me, Charles Wallace, come away from IT, come back, come home. I love you, Charles. Oh, Charles Wallace, I love you.

Tears were streaming down her cheeks, but she was unaware of them.

Now she was even able to look at him, at this animated thing that was not her own Charles Wallace at all. She was able to look and love.

I love you. Charles Wallace, you are my darling and my dear and the light of my life and the treasure of my heart. I love you. I love you, I love you.

...Then suddenly he was running, pelting, he was in her arms. He was shrieking with sobs. "Meg! Meg! Meg!"

Well jeez, now I'M crying. But I find it fascinating and instructive what role KNOWLEDGE plays in courage in A Wrinkle in Time, where Meg, who has been castigated by her math teachers by not doing their problems her own way, discovers that her stubbornness about what she knows is right is her greatest strength. It's not really her love for her brother that saves him and her father and herself from being taken over by the Dark Thing. It's her faults (anger, impatience, stubbornness) that keep her from being sucked in by the great throbbing brain telling her to fall in line. Because Meg's bullheadedness—her insistence on doing things her own way, her understanding that she is probably right, her anger at the attempts to silence her—isn't simply a cute narrative depiction of a spunky girl. She's not spunky, she's difficult. And, as unattractive as those traits are to others, Meg's faults amount to no less than a belief in herself. And, as Mrs. Who says: Justitae soror vides—faith is the sister of justice.

—————————————————-

As usual, you ladies have done me proud. The solution to last week's Plotfinder, which involved streaky lemon pie and bad hair, was, of course, Candace F. Ransom's Fourteen and Holding. (Just FYI, for the record, I hope you all know I never print Plotfinders that I, MISTRESS OF FINE LINES, know or can recall. So you are doing all this excellent work yourselves.) The winner, by literally FOUR MINUTES, by email, was one Rita D. Congratulations, Rita! As you will recall, winners get to choose an upcoming Fine Lines; Rita, write me at jezziefinelines@gmail.com to claim your prize.

Now, for this week's Plotfinder:

I swear I read this book dozens of times — including as an official class assignment in the 5th grade — so I can't believe I've completely forgotten its name. It's about a family of orphans (naturally), I think five of them. The book is from the point of view of the second-oldest daughter as she tries to hold the family together after their grandmother dies. They try to hide the fact that their grandmother died from all the neighbors, and make ends meet by going up into the woods and collecting wild herbs like digitalis that they sell to people from the city for money. They have an evil landlord named Keyser Pease, and at one point they have to save him from dying from a horrible disease by putting him in a bathtub full of fried onions. (I still have no idea what that was about.) The eldest daughter, who is described as "cloudy-headed," ends up falling in love with the evil landlord and they get married, which saves the family from being evicted.

I don't think this is The Boxcar Children. (In case it is, just be like THE BOXCAR CHILDREN DUH, LIZZIE.) Just for insurance purposes, however, I'm going to add my own Plotfinder that's been bugging me this week, which is also about orphans. I'm going to ital myself too so I don't feel alienated from you all:

What's the book where a family of foster children, led by an older, now of-age foster child, runs off when they are about to be separated because the youngest is about to be adopted? They are super-on-the-lam all the time. The oldest guy is kind of nice. At some point after their first escape they pick fruit in California. There's some issue of cards on construction paper being written to absent parents. There's also a haunted house with peeled grapes for eyes where they're almost caught and have to move yet again. The youngest boy (of course) has a lisp and probably carries around a blanket, and I believe there's a quiet, genius black child (of course) whose computer skills become useful at some point. And a young hispanic boy who likes...skateboards? Can this be? He's obsessed with something boy-ish that is provided to him on Christmas, perhaps. They buy a house at some point, and are allowed to stay together at the end.

You can answer in the comments below, or send an email to jezziefinelines@gmail.com. First correct answer(s) win. (Yes, this week there is the possibility for two wins!) Winner(s) get(s) to demand a column, nicely or intemperately, however so they choose. In any case, I will be sure to bring all your answers to life and wrap them in fur after you freeze and pass through the Dark Thing, however snatchy the forces of evil have made you.

Next week's reading! Reach for your special place...we are going to do Deenie, followed the next week by last week's Plotfinder win request, Julie of the Wolves.

A Wrinkle In Time [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: Love Is One Of The Choices: No, Not That 'Sex And The City'
•The Girl With The Silver Eyes: Little Pitchers Have Big Pharma
•Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself: Springtime For Hitler, Part II
•Summer Of My German Soldier: Springtime For Hitler, Part I
•From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler: City Of Angels
•A Gift Of Magic: Totally Psyched
•Are You There Crazy Psychic Muse? It's Me, Lois Duncan
•The Secret Garden: Still No Idea What A Missel Thrush Is
•To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie: No Telephone To Child Services
•The Westing Game: Partners In Crime
• The Moon By Night: Travels With Vicky
•My Sweet Audrina: The Book Of Sister And Forgetting
•The Long Secret: CSI: Puberty
•The Cat Ate My Gymsuit: A Pocket Full Of Orange Pits
•The Witch Of Blackbird Pond: Colonies, Slit Sleeves And Stocks, Oh My!
•Are You In The House Alone? One Out Of Four, Maybe More
•Jacob Have I Loved: Oh, Who Am I Kidding, I Reread This Book Once A Week
• Then Again, Maybe I Won't: Close Your Eyes, And Think Of Jersey City
•My Darling, My Hamburger: I Will Gladly Pay You Tomorrow For A D&C Today
•All-Of-A-Kind Family: Where I Would Put Something Yiddish If I Thought You Goyishe Farshtinkiners Would Farshteyn
•Island Of The Blue Dolphins: I'm A Cormorant And I Don't Care
•Little House In The Big Woods: I Play With A Pig Bladder Like It's A Balloon
•The Grounding Of Group Six: Have Fun At School, Kids, And Don't Forget To Die

Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads Madeleine L'Engle's 1963 novel 'The Moon By Night,' in which Vicky Austin goes camping and gets to know boys from A to Z.

It was John's voice and he was calling for me. I supposed somewhere on the inside of my mind I realized it, but with the outside of my mind all I heard was the constant crying of sea gulls and the incoming boom of breakers.

Don't buy into the party of unity: When it's comes to Madeleine L'Engle, you're either a Meg, Polly, or Vicky girl. (NO ONE is Camilla. And whatever, Maggies — you're deliberately being provoking.) For those of you rusty on the trois dames of L'Engle's works, Meg is, OF COURSE, Meg Murray, of A Wrinkle in Time fame, while Polly (Polyhymnia) is her red-headed daughter of the excellent Dragons in the Waters action. Vicky is Vicky Austin, of Meet the Austins, two kinds of awkward, three kinds of innocent, and strangely appealing for a fourteen-year-old given to frequent bouts of vigorous prayer.

The Moon By Night is the second in the Austin family trilogy, and when we catch up with Vicky, she's just exited the ugly duckling stage, where all her "sticky-out bones and unmanageable hair seem to come to some sort of agreement." (Exiting the awkward stage, as we have learned, is a narratively advantageous time to launch a novel, AS WE CAN NOW GET A LOVE INTEREST OR POSSIBLY TWO IN THE MIX. More on that soon.)

The Austin family — of the kindly physician father, the lovely stay-at-home mother, the older, supersmart brother, John, the pretty youngest daughter, Suzy, the surprise child, Rob, and Vicky in the middle — have just married off Vicky's mother's best friend to her uncle, deposited their foster daughter, Maggie, with the happy couple, and headed off on a camping trip across the country, bearing their usual Austin cheer with them:

"When we reached the mainland we headed for a parkway and started playing the alphabet game. You know, you divide up by who's sitting on which side of the car, and you have to find the letters of the alphabet, in order, one by one, on the signs. John and Daddy and Suzy were way ahead until they came to Q, and then Mother and Rob and I caught up with them and won. Then we played Animal Rummy, and Rob saw a white horse and won that. And of course we sang. We always do a lot of singing."

"John [is] terrifically intelligent, but not a bit of a grind. I mean, he just comes home from school and sits down and gets his homework done in half the time it takes me to do mine. He's good at sports, too, the kind you can do with glasses on, like basketball and track. As far as I can see he's good at just about everything, I'm proud of him, sure, but sometimes I feel, well, just kind of said, because I can't ever hope to be the kind of person John is. I don't even know what I want to be yet."

In fact, the whole Christianity thing is so sublimated you are mostly concentrated, like Vicky, on GETTING TO THE BOY STUFF. This occurs right after the family has settled in at one of their first campgrounds and Daddy fights off a hood because he, you know, KNOWS JUDO.

Suzy asked, "Daddy, weren't you scared?"

"I didn't like it," Daddy said, "but most hoodlums are cowards when it comes to a showdown. They're only brave when they think you're afraid of them. Now don't let this spoil our trip, and don't let it spoil Tennessee."

"Are we to be frightened of our teen-agers?" Mother asked bitterly. "Has it come to that?"

"Vicky and I are teen-agers," John said. "You can't blame teen-agers any more than you can Tennessee. There are dopy fringe elements in every group. I wrote a paper on it for Social Studies."

Because, how awesome is it that you're on a vacation and are finally pretty and your parents are nice but constantly making you sing and you kind of like it but ISN'T ANYTHING ELSE GOING TO EVER HAPPEN TO ME and the guy across the way full STROLLS UP, ASKS YOU OUT, and is a real person, filled with contradictions, enough that your family totally hates him on sight, even though though he has his virtues and not just some weird guy trying to sleep with you:

"You've got an interesting face, Vicky," Zachary said as we walked back towards our tent. "Not pretty-pretty, but there's something more. And a darned good figure. I'd say something other than darned only I might shock little unhatched you."

"I'm not so unhatched as all that."

"No?"

"No."

"I'll bet you nothing's happened to you all your life long. Your meals have always been put in front of you and if you skin your little knee you can run crying to Mommie and Poppie and they'll kiss it and make everything all right."

Well, maybe I didn't have very much experience so far. But I was on my way to getting it.

What's most fascinating about L'Engle is how she's able to weave the actual events of the trip with great moral quandaries to the extent that an adult can, with a stretch, almost read them as parables. You could say some delinquents throw a Coke bottle at their car, or that they, like all travelers, are beset upon by thieves on the road. They either use their station wagon to drive some Girl Scouts out of a flooded canyon, or they are Noah, with an ark saving the innocents. There's a baby left in a tent with Mother, and a fallen woman who gratefully retrieves her. Vicky learns about Native Americans, a town destroyed by half the mountain, and the Holocaust, American imperialism. She sees New Mexico: "At home in Thornhill nobody is really poor, and it was awful to see the shacks and shanties and poor, foreign-looking people along the roadside. No wonder D.H. Lawrence isn't really happy in New Mexico." She sees "The Diary of Anne Frank" with Zach when the family reaches Laguna Beach. "If God lets things be unfair, if He lets things like Anne Frank happen, then I don't love Him, I hate Him!" she cries. Dude, don't hold on a second. YOU'RE GOING TO MEET ANOTHER GUY.

And enter Andy Ford, the moral redhead who does not want Vicky to see Zach anymore than Zach wants Andy to see Vicky! Eff morality, this entire book is about two guys chasing Vicky around sunlit canyons and dark, starry nights around the fire, and, though you have to actually read about three more books to see how it resolves, I would sit through any amount of secret sermonizing to find out what happens next.

"You're a funny kid," Zach tells Vicky: "a mixture of goody-goody little Miss Prunes, and quite a gal. I look forward to knowing you in five years." Trust us, Zach, there's all this crap about dolphins and lovers and telekenesis and it's AWESOME.

* Gold star to anyone who can mention when this book breaks the space-time continuum.

The Moon By Night [Amazon]
Lizzie Skurnick [The Old Hag]

Earlier: My Sweet Audrina: The Book Of Sister And Forgetting
•The Long Secret: CSI: Puberty
•The Cat Ate My Gymsuit: A Pocket Full Of Orange Pits
•The Witch Of Blackbird Pond: Colonies, Slit Sleeves And Stocks, Oh My!
•Are You In The House Alone? One Out Of Four, Maybe More
•Jacob Have I Loved: Oh, Who Am I Kidding, I Reread This Book Once A Week
• Then Again, Maybe I Won't: Close Your Eyes, And Think Of Jersey City
•My Darling, My Hamburger: I Will Gladly Pay You Tomorrow For A D&C Today
•All-Of-A-Kind Family: Where I Would Put Something Yiddish If I Thought You Goyishe Farshtinkiners Would Farshteyn
•Island Of The Blue Dolphins: I'm A Cormorant And I Don't Care
•Little House In The Big Woods: I Play With A Pig Bladder Like It's A Balloon
•The Grounding Of Group Six: Have Fun At School, Kids, And Don't Forget To Die
•Are You There Crazy Psychic Muse? It's Me, Lois Duncan

Madeleine L'Engle, Children's Writer, Is Dead [New York Times]