this is my favorite in the time quintet. the murray kids are all grown up-- charles wallace is fifteen, and everyone is home for the holidays. meg is married to calvin. he's at a conference in england, so the murrays invite calvin's mother to supper.
she thrusts an ancient rune onto charles wallace, with which he is to stop a nuclear war. thus the next adventure commences. there's a unicorn, a new dog, more echthroi, and hope. always hope.

Ohhhh Madeleine L'Engle where are you going with this series???? I soooooo desperately want to love the rest of the books in the Wrinkle series, but I just don't... You are such a gifted and talented writer, and I see the underlying tones of Christianity in your writing, but I feel your message gets so jumbled up with all these family generations and crazy names and "out in left space" plot lines. It overall makes the storyline too hard to follow for me.

"Hate hurts the hater more'n the hated."

There are some great lessons in these books for kids to grasp onto, I think these get lost in the crazy maze you have to take to get through the book. And as a fairly decently educated adult I'm getting lost, then I know these wonderful themes are getting lost on the younger generation this was intended for. After this book, I may have to take a break from this series and come back to it later.....

I wish I loved these books as much as I did when I was younger. I think one of my most prominent complaints is simply that things don't really seem driven by the characters' actions - there's just these great sweeping events that are going to happen either way, and although I think this book improved on the first two for that, there's still this feeling that... events just happen to the characters, and they don't really have to work to solve the problems. Also, Meg's 'frame story' thing was kind of annoying. It just felt like an excuse to have Meg in the book.

Definitely not my favorite of the series- it was just too much going on so it got a bit confusing but it was still enjoyable.

Heavy stuff for a children's book.

But, the more I read about trauma, the more amazed I am at what she got right.

I re-read all of these in a row: A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door and this conclusion. What a difference in quality. But this isn't the typical "gold, silver, brass" progression of a trilogy. It's more like 'gold, silver, mud.'

A Swiftly Tilting Planet is terribly dated and even racist. There's a bad guy in Patagonia who wants to use The Bomb and Charles Wallace can only fix the problem by traveling back in time and space to make sure the right father begets the guy with his finger on the button. The characters actually talk about bloodlines and blood here. So in this scenario, genetics create destiny.

Don't even get me started on this strange, ancient connection L'Engle cooks up between Welsh people and Native Americans in Patagonia who are envisioned as living in perfect harmony with each other and their environment. They're beyond Noble Savage and back to the Garden of Eden. The white people bring original sin--well, in the form of a Cain and Abel story--and it gets mixed into the bloodline of the Patagonian Indians. It's better than original sin coming from the Native Americans but not much. And anyway in the end, you can tell the good guy 'cause he has blue eyes. What does this say to you?

Oh, Madeleine, you hurt me with this conclusion to the trilogy, really you did.

This was my favorite of the three Wrinkle in Time books.