This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle’s justly loved young adult novel about children who must rescue a dimension-hopping physicist who has been trapped by a malignant intelligence bent on bringing conformity to the universe.
Hill and Wang’s A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel is Hope Larson’s really wonderful and worthy adaptation of the original. Larson is very faithful to the original text, and the graphic form really suits the story, as it allows for direct illustration of some of the more abstract concepts (such as the notion of folding space in higher dimensions to attain faster-than-light transpositions of matter).
But Larson does more than capture the abstract with her graphics. L’Engle’s charm and gift was in her ability to marry the abstract with the numinous — to infuse stories about math and physics with so much heart, heartbreak, bravery, sorrow and joy that they changed everyone who read them. Larson does a brilliant job of capturing this crucial element of L’Engle’s style.
I read this book aloud to my four year old daughter over a couple weeks’ worth of bedtimes. There were plenty of times when I was sure that the nuances of the story were going over her head (she didn’t come out of the experience with any sense of what a tesseract is!) but her interest never, ever wavered. That’s because Larson’s illustrations do such a fine job of showing the emotional arc of L’Engle’s characters that even a small child could not help but be drawn into the drama. In fact, reading this book turned out to be both a treat and a chore, because every night’s session ended with her demanding that I read more. And when we finished the book and closed the cover, she took it from my hands, turned it over, handed it back to me and said, “Again.”
Hard to argue with that.
Hill and Wang were kind enough to give us exclusive access to chapter two, which you’ll find below, past the jump!
