[If you think you've seen this post before, you have. I deleted the original to get rid of spam comments. No non-spam comments were harmed by this procedure.]
Yesterday [December 2] I finally did something I'd been meaning to do for years, namely re-read Madeleine L'Engle's classic young-adult fantasy A Wrinkle In Time. I can't remember the last time I read it, but it had probably been close to thirty years ago. It wasn't as mind-blowing as I remember, but I do want to read the rest of the series.
AWIT was also a lot shorter than I remember, although it was pretty dense nonetheless. I wasn't expecting all the Christian references, and I definitely wasn't expecting them to be so prominent. It didn't feel like a book written in the early '60s -- more like something from the end of the decade or the early '70s.
Perhaps most striking, though, was the Chris Claremont sensibility I got from the whole thing. Yes, I know that if anything, AWIT would have been an influence on Claremont, not the other way around. Still, you have a mousy, nerdy teenage girl unappreciated by her peers, who's part of a family where almost everyone is either hyper-competent, extremely attractive, and/or outright super-powered. They all live in the rural Northeast (close to Westchester County?) where our heroine Meg meets her soulmate Calvin, who almost immediately starts talking about his own special destiny -- maybe not in those terms, but close enough. Meg and Calvin and little telepathic Charles Wallace have a series of well-written intergalactic Christian-flavored adventures against an implacable evil, until everything is solved by the power of love.
Now, despite that smart-aleck tone, I did like the book, but darn if it didn't seem like C.S. Lewis' Uncanny X-Men.
Yesterday [December 2] I finally did something I'd been meaning to do for years, namely re-read Madeleine L'Engle's classic young-adult fantasy A Wrinkle In Time. I can't remember the last time I read it, but it had probably been close to thirty years ago. It wasn't as mind-blowing as I remember, but I do want to read the rest of the series.
AWIT was also a lot shorter than I remember, although it was pretty dense nonetheless. I wasn't expecting all the Christian references, and I definitely wasn't expecting them to be so prominent. It didn't feel like a book written in the early '60s -- more like something from the end of the decade or the early '70s.
Perhaps most striking, though, was the Chris Claremont sensibility I got from the whole thing. Yes, I know that if anything, AWIT would have been an influence on Claremont, not the other way around. Still, you have a mousy, nerdy teenage girl unappreciated by her peers, who's part of a family where almost everyone is either hyper-competent, extremely attractive, and/or outright super-powered. They all live in the rural Northeast (close to Westchester County?) where our heroine Meg meets her soulmate Calvin, who almost immediately starts talking about his own special destiny -- maybe not in those terms, but close enough. Meg and Calvin and little telepathic Charles Wallace have a series of well-written intergalactic Christian-flavored adventures against an implacable evil, until everything is solved by the power of love.
Now, despite that smart-aleck tone, I did like the book, but darn if it didn't seem like C.S. Lewis' Uncanny X-Men.
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