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Excerpt

Excerpt

Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading

Foreword

You Are What You Read
By Laura Lippman

A few weeks ago, I found myself playing with the idea that someone had grown thin from carrying a grudge. It was clearly a literary allusion—my mind is an ill-organized attic of such stray and fragmented lines—but I wanted to pin down the source before I, well, stole it. The phrase sounded Shakespearean to my ears; perhaps it was part of Cassius’s lean and hungry look? Yet a quick Google search on “grudge” “thin” and, belated inspiration, “stoop-shouldered,” yielded nothing. Still I knew someone else had said this first. Thin … grudge … stoop-shouldered. Thin … grudge … stoop-shouldered. I finally conjured an image of a young red-headed man, bent over an experiment in a high school chem lab, and then I had it: My bard was no less than Lenora Mattingly Weber, the author of a young adult series that followed Catherine Cecilia “Beany” Malone of Denver from junior high to the early years of her marriage. The grudge-holder with poor posture was Norbett Rhodes, her first real boyfriend. Aficionados of young adult fiction will not be surprised to learn that Beany’s devotion helped to straighten Norbett up and out.

And I was ashamed. Not that I confused Weber with Shakespeare, but that I had to grope for the source. I know Weber’s work so well that I used to play Beany trivia with my sister, another fan of the series. Between us, we own all of Weber’s books and I re-read them regularly. I also re-read Maud Hart Lovelace, Edward Eager, Noel Streatfeild, Beverly Cleary, Betty MacDonald, Anne Emery, Sally Benson—you get the picture. By day, I pretend to seriousness, reading contemporary novels and classics. But at night, mind soft and eyes bleary, I am likely to crawl into bed with a beloved book from my youth, something I know almost by heart. The familiar words soothe and relax far better than any over-the-counter sleep aid.

Some people are baffled by re-reading in general, the re-reading of children’s books in particular. What’s the point? Why waste time revisiting the books of childhood when there’s so much else to read? With these essays, Lizzie Skurnick has answered those questions far more eloquently than I ever could. It’s as if a kindly psychiatrist suddenly appeared with a sheaf of missing brain scans. Do you giggle when someone tells you to “sit here for the present”? You are channeling Ramona Quimby, who turned those simple words into a daunting challenge. Does the mere mention of a mink-trimmed coat make you secretly swoon, even though you are rabidly anti-fur? You have “A Little Princess” complex. Do you long to cover your enemies with leeches? You’re having a “Little House” flashback.

Lizzie first started writing these pieces as a regular feature, Fine Lines, for Jezebel.com. In a world measured by page views and comments, Fine Lines was an instant success when it debuted in November 2007. It turned out that the world was teeming with women like me, who had been shaped by the reading lists of their youths. And Lizzie—a poet/critic/journalist who once toiled in the Sweet Valley High sweatshop and wrote Alias novelizations—was the perfect guide. (In interest of full disclosure, she also is a dear friend.) Funny, smart and skeptical, she didn’t limit herself to the Newbery-ordained, librarian-blessed works, although there are plenty of those to be found here. No, Lizzie understands that, say, The Grounding of Group 6Flowers in the Attic and Summer of Fear affected us as profoundly as Little Women. We just needed someone else to say it first.

Don’t be fooled, however, by the breezy, comic tone and liberal use of CAPITALS. This is serious stuff, difficult to execute. I know, because I substituted for Lizzie twice, and was surprised by the challenges of the form. (I also was taken aback by the vehemence of adult women who do NOT want to rethink their allegiance to certain childhood classics, and please do not trouble them with anything as picayune as facts, thank you very much.) Demon re-reader that I was, I learned from Lizzie not to use beloved texts merely as soothing soporifics, but to root around in them for—sorry, it must be said—subtext. Thus retrained, I found even more to love in writers ranging from Beverly Cleary to Sandra Scoppetone. I also have found a few lacking, even a little dangerous in their agendas, although the sins of YA writers are easily eclipsed by the misogynist worlds of Mario Puzo, Harold Robbins and even Jacqueline Susann. Which, alas, I also read when very young, but at least had the good sense not to re-read. Except for Susann.

Mary Gordon, in her seminal essay on American literature, “Good Boys and Dead Girls,” likened certain novelists to untrustworthy tour guides. They might show us great things of beauty, she wrote, but they also might insist that a fetid swamp is a dazzling waterfall. Even our best writers—William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser—had their lapses, especially in passages about women. Gordon concluded that we can’t change the writers, only ourselves. We must stand firm in the face of their lies and decide if some are worth our loyalty at all. In our voyages back to literary landscapes that we loved, Lizzie provides a vital reality check. She will not only tell that you that the emperor is wearing no clothes, but might note that he needs a discreet wax job as well.

By the time we realize the profound influences of our youthful reading lists, it’s too late to undo them. Yes, if I knew then what I know now, I would have read more seriously and critically during those crucial years that my brain was a big, porous sponge. But I didn’t and my hunch is that you, dear reader, didn’t either. So stretch out on Dr. Lizzie’s couch and find out why you think it would be kind of cozy to be locked up in an attic with your brother. Or learn to dissect the subtle class consciousness of Judy Blume’s New Jersey. Ponder the way that Lois Duncan’s characters come into unexpected powers, natural and supernatural alike, as they enter adolescence. Contemplate the fact that Ramona Quimby may be a fictional creation on a par with Emma Bovary. We should not be ashamed of re-reading our favorite books, only of re-reading them thoughtlessly.

Laura Lippman
Baltimore, MD 
November 2008

Introduction

Getting My Period
By Lizzie Skurnick

I can’t remember the book that made me into a reader. (God, how much better would this story be if I could!) All I remember is that first I wasn’t a reader, and then, suddenly, I was. (A Taste of BlackberriesThe Witch of Blackbird Pond? The novelization ofThe Karate Kid?) I had been a fretful classroom reciter, following along in a desultory manner while my mother read my brother and me Lad: A Dog and The Hobbit at bedtime. Now, suddenly, I was the kind of girl who felt true physical pain when asked to put down a book at the dinner table, who asked friends over and ignored them to finish Island of the Blue Dolphins for the fifth time. (This created a complex tangle of outrage: my parents wanted me to pay attention to my friends; my friends wanted their parents to stop asking them why they didn’t read as much as I did.) But I felt ravenous towards each book, like a vampire desperate to clamp my fangs into the foreign body until it was drained in its entirety, slumping lifeless to the floor. (A Gift of MagicSportSuperfudge???) I understood we were eating dinner. But after all, did dinner—and the rest of the people sitting around at the table—really require my undivided attention to be eaten? Eating could happen anytime. This book (Beat the Turtle DrumIggie’s HouseOn the Banks of Plum Creek?) was happening now.

Luckily for my parents, who had tucked away half of their books in my room for storage, I was also, in my tastes, completely indiscriminate. No leather-bound, $100 sets of classics for young readers necessary—if it was my brother’s Tales of the Deep, completely with a many-armed “kraken” on the cover; if it was my mother’s old copy of The Fixer; if it was my grandmother’sNicholas and Alexandra; it didn’t matter. It was on the shelf and I could follow at least 35% of the action? I gave a try. By the age of 10, I had developed a taste for Erma Bombeck, William Least Heat Moon, The Monkey Wrench Gang, and Sonia Levitan. I had read Lore Segal’s Her First American, and understood it, a little—ditto The Assistant. I was very fond of Terms of Endearment and read it dozens of times. (I still think it’s under-appreciated.) There was a Richard Bach stage—I’m not ashamed, although, if you must know, Jonathan Livingston Seagull is his weakest work—and, pressed by my mother, a dalliance with Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which I’m also not ashamed to say, eluded me completely, especially after I’d seen Nastasia Kinski in the movie.

The conventional wisdom is that a precocious reader is a child in possession of a preternatural grasp of both the facts and features of the adult world. This may well be true of some, but it was not true of me. My reading list didn’t grant me access to the particulars of adult life, but to its moody interstices, the dark web of complex feeling that apparently suffused life after grade school. Like a child reciting nursery rhyme, I was consumed with the music of the words, not the circumstances surrounding Little Miss Muffet and her actual tuffet. (Well, can you, even now, confidently define “tuffet”?) Let’s take The Good Earth. (The Good Earth???) I knew nothing about rice farming, mistresses, dynasties, or opium—I couldn’t have pointed out China on amap—but still, I understood Wang Lung in all his lust, kindness, weakness, and rage, and O-Lan in her sorrow and strength. The former slave who, freed, keeps two pearls hanging between her breasts! Which her husband takes from her, for his mistress! Which he thinks of still, miserably, after her death! Gah—who cared what exactly where China was!

One would also think such precocity would make one’s school reading a snap, but in fact, I took a dim view of all of our reading assignments. After all, after a character like Terms of Endearment’s Emma, who soaks triumphantly in the tub after she goads her husband into punching her to expatiate her guilt for having an affair, how worked up was I supposed to get about Curley’s wife in Of Mice and Men? (Anyone who wanted to read seriously scary Steinbeck, I knew, should try that rape scene inThe Wayward Bus.) All those animals … The Red PonyThe Old Man and the SeaOf Mice and MenWatership Down—was this English class, or 4-H? I still credit those teachers for my categorical refusal to read Animal Farm. Books for middle-graders, young adults, and teens, apparently, were moral stories painted in broad strokes, slim texts in large fonts, small plots with big ideas with some furry friends thrown in to keep it bedtime-ready. The pigs are how power corrupts, the fish is God, the pony is innocence, or death, or something. Forget about seducing a realtor in an empty house while your wussy husband toils away on his thesis, then making sure you get socked in the jaw so you don’t feel too bad about it.

Still—had I only had my parents ’leftovers and my teachers ’assignments to go on, I’m sure I would have survived just fine on a diet of The Counterlife, occasionally cut with The Catcher in the Rye, getting my girl-growth vitamins from works like Little Women. (The discerning reader would definitely throw some Trixie Beldenin there for seasoning, too.) But, as most of the bookworms born about a hundred years too late for An Old-Fashioned Girl and a few decades, give or take, too early forGossip Girls know, there was another option.

The early 60s to the late 80s was a funny time in YA literature. Before, books for young girls were just that—a marvelous work like The Secret Garden, say—or simply wholesome and entertaining works centering around a spunky female character, like Nancy Drew, whose mysteries didn’t deal with adolescence for girls so much as star a young adolescent girl. (In this vein, I seem to have some memory of a work called Candy Striper, one of a workplace-based series—Ski Instructor?—which had a lot of tightly pulled bed corners, water pitchers and stiff starched caps.) In short—we were in the story, but you’d be hard-pressed to say it was our story, any more than Love Boat was a moving depiction of life at sea.

But, starting with books like Beverly Cleary’s Fifteen or Lois Duncan’s When the Bough Breaks, we started to see an entirely new animal—books that dealt with the lives and dramas of adolescent girls on their own terms, in their own worlds. There was, of course, Judy Blume’s whole oeuvre, which took us from getting our periods to losing our virginity, and also Lois Duncan’s, which put a supernatural twist on the family dynamic. Writers like Katherine Paterson or Robert Cormier had novels with an adult’s level of complexity in the inner worlds of the protagonists, and Paul Zindel’s mordant, funny books about the lives of the teens of Bayonne and Staten Island were a window into an unusual world, to say the least. (Well, not that unusual for ME. I was raised in Jersey.) There were Scott O’Dell’s historical novels of brave girls left alone on islands, Paula Danziger’s laser-like dissection of high schools and camps, Norma Klein’s blase, sexually active NY sophisticates, Madeline L’Engle’s three stunning heroines—Meg, Vicky, and Polly (you could write an entire book just on L’Engle’s heroines!)—girls in the center of their own adventures.

But it wasn’t only that the books were about teens living, quote unquote, today. It was that these books treated us as adults, capable of understanding complex issues, of appreciating complicated plots, of getting sophisticated jokes—of being funny and smart, ourselves. These weren’t classics tailor-made for Cliffs Notes, and they weren’t the adult books deemed mild and metaphorical enough to still be safe for children. (Seriously, though—when will administrators start noticing that gay sex scene in The Great Gatsby?) Whatever complex strains of melancholy, whatever deep reservoirs of mordant humor, whatever sophisticated irony I had found in the books I plucked off my parents ’shelves—here they were in books for teens too, in guises both serious and shallow.

When I first started doing reviews of classic young adult literature for Jezebel’s Fine Lines column, I was amused and surprised by the odd, visceral details that returned to me with every work: Pa bringing the girls real white sugar wrapped in brown paper in Little House in the Big Woods, Sally J. Freeman having a Man ’O War wrapped around her foot (who even knew what a Man O ’War was?), Claudia choosing macaroni at the Automat in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. These strong, charged images that never leave me—they’re often even stronger than memories I have of my own life. You simply see the cover, and they come back—like fragments of a dream you can’t quite remember, or Proust’s madeleine, but even stranger, since you’ve never even tasted one.

Some of the lives I read about were very similar to mine (I could see a lot of my own camp life in There’s a Bat in Bunk Five, minus the cute boyfriend, natch), and some couldn’t be more different (despite my best efforts, I have yet to achieve psychic synergy with a dolphin). But it wasn’t about finding yourself—or not finding yourself—in the circumstances of a girl’s life, as much as you might be fascinated by it. It was about seeing yourself—and your friends, and your enemies—in the actual girl.

It might have begun with the covers. Most were either snapshots or looked like soft paintings of snapshots (whither, whither the painted cover?), with girls who were neither good-looking nor not-good-looking, girls in glasses, with braces, standing in front of the mirror or smiling happily in the arms of a boy, glowering in front of a locker, standing with bonnet and hoop skirt on lonely plane, girls with head, feet and body miraculously intact. There they were, waiting like very large dolls for the tug on the string that would start them moving and speaking.

In them I found a window, a scrying glass, into a complex consciousness, a life like my own, but writ large in all of its messy ambiguity. Nothing, as of yet, had happened to me. But there was the world, and everything happening in it, right in the bright row of spines, waiting for me to pull out its next chapter, to turn the book over, to open the first page and read.

Chapter 1

Still Checked Out:
YA Heroines We’ll Never Return

Mom … Can Sally J. Sleep Over?

If you ask me, it is truly a symbol of the great injustice of life as we know it today that the only girl heroine’s name that can truly be said to have entered the vernacular is “Pollyanna.” (I mean, have you even read Pollyanna? I may have made it through about 10 minutes of the movie—that is, if I’m not confusing it withHeidi.) It’s an even greater injustice that the appellative, of course, is a pejorative. It’s not only that, out of the 9,000 exciting heroines you could mention, our language reflects only one. It’s that the one character elected for immortality, the linguistic ambassador for young women in the world, is a prating good-goody who spreads her good cheer with the relentless force of a Caterpillar.

If I had my way, we would add some other options to the mix. What, for example, about being a Ramona? (Inquisitive, inspired, unaccountably amusing.) A Meg? (Stubborn, brainy, admirably self-questioning.) A Claudia! (Exquisitely tasteful, stylized, demanding—the Michael Kors of the under–12 set.) A Wifey! (Sorry, wrong chapter.) A Margaret! (Still Chapter 2.)

But you get my point. Just as there are certain books we drag with us to bed year after year like a beloved, worn blanket, there are certain heroines we find continually in circulation, like especially festive members of a massive slumber party circuit. (Ramona! Are you putting toothpaste in the sink again?)

And why do they continue to receive our coveted Saturday-night invitations? Well, first, they are marvelously fun to be around. (See above: Toothpaste.) They also teach us new things, like what an Automat is, or what’s a charming, off-the-beaten track place you might want to consider when you next run away. (Here’s a hint: Admission is only what you can give!) They remind us of ourselves—Meg’s glumness over her awkward stage comes to mind—even as they perform galactic feats of travel that challenge our 8-year-old grasp of algebra. (You had me at “square the square.”) They have annoying brothers, worried mothers and affectionate fathers—even doting bubehs—and while they see themselves in the mirror, we can see ourselves in their Margaret O’Brian coronet.

And they challenge us, like the best of friends, in general—not only to be ourselves, but to be more interesting, inspired versions of ourselves, girls unafraid to squeeze toothpaste, sleep on a Louis XIV bed or keep important tabs on all the neighbors, even if they’re not afraid they’re Hitler. (Yes, Sally—but you didn’t think I’d forget Harriet, did you?) In search of their constant company, I’m sure the nerdier among us will be happy to cop to the occasional commemorative costume, poem or diorama or website. This is nonsense; we owe our best friends a durable immortality. Next stop: let’s get them right into the lexicon.

[BOOK REPORT]

A Wrinkle in Time
By Madeleine L’Engle
1962

*THE GIRL WHO TRAVELS THROUGH TIME TO SAVE HER FATHER … AND THE UNIVERSE*

/Did a shadow fall across the moon or did the moon simply go out, extinguished as abruptly and completely as a candle? There was still the sound of leaves, a terrified, terrifying rushing. All light was gone. Darkness was complete. Suddenly the wind was gone, and all sound. Meg felt that Calvin was being torn from her. When she reached for him her fingers touched nothing.

She screamed out, “Charles!” and whether it was to help him or for him to help her, she did not know. The word was flung back down her throat and she choked on it.

She was completely alone./

 

THE GREAT BRAIN

It was a dark and stormy night.

If I had my way, none of us would have to read this essay at all. Instead, we’d join hands, hear a great 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, consume hot cocoa, jam on bread, and liverwurst-and-cream-cheese sandwiches while swinging our legs at the kitchen table, then sidestep for a moment onto a planet inhabited by gentle gray creatures with dents for eyes. We would be inserted into some mitochondria, battle for the soul of Madoc/Maddox, and eat 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 and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine by way of Portugal, and be concerned with cell regeneration in starfish. We’d be smacked on the ass by a dolphin. We’d try to answer the questions of God, sex, and the galaxy, and if the principal ever tried to get us to come back to school, why, we’d drag him along with us, too.

God, how much does it kill me that we can’t do those things! (Especially the dolphin part.) But, as A Wrinkle in Time’s opaque Mrs. Who would have us recall Dante said, Come t’e picciol fallow amaro morso. (What grievous pain a little fault doth give thee!) Alas, it will have to be enough for us to spend a bit of time in the company of a most short-fused, half-cocked, be-spectacled literary heroine—Meg Murry, the first heroine to endear herself to the reader by way of atom rearrangement.

Meg Murray—brilliant at math, poor at geography, eschewing rumination for action—is 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 A Wrinkle in Time, Meg, joined by her neighbor Calvin O’Keefe and her quietly remarkable younger brother Charles Wallace, in a Wrinkle in Time, 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, Murry family, they—and Meg in particular—are in somewhat of a crisis. Their father has been missing for some months, a fact which the town’s citizens are only too happy to snidely snicker over. Long scorned for their elite, egghead predilections (Dr. Murry, a physicist, is an advisor to the President) the Murry family is finally in a position where the town can feel superior to them.

Meg has responded to this with admirable intemperance—namely, slugging a boy who’s just called Charles Wallace her “dumb baby brother.” Charles Wallace, of course, is anything but—polymath whose exquisite intellect also makes him highly attuned to those around him, particularly Meg, whose fury Charles Wallace sympathizes with, but only because he knows it hurts Meg more than anyone else. This is more than we can say for Mr. Jenkins, the principal, who will be brought down in a later sequel but is now just being kind of an ass:

“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?”

Unfortunately for Meg, as in the case of so many of the outwardly belligerent, a propensity for bellowing hides a healthy case of “I hate myself and would like to die.” Still outraged by the boys ’insults, alone in the bathroom, Meg tells her cat, “Just be glad you’re a kitten and not a monster like me.”

The problem for Meg is that, while she’s well able to see the truth about others, good or bad, she has a miserable lack of insight into herself. Worse yet, she is surrounded by people who knowexactly who they are. Her younger twin brothers, alone among the Murrys, manage to fit in: “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. (You Poly and Vicky girls can keep your Zachary Grays and Adam Eddingtons.) 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, as the family knows perfectly, has not gone on the lam with a beautiful woman, but is 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! (Readers who always skipped over the technical points in L’Engle: you might want to commence skipping now.) Okay, imagine an ant crawling on a piece of string. Now, imagine the string is a skirt! Oh, whatever, just listen to Mrs. Whatsit:

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. I have always been grateful to L’Engle for the next section, which helped me pass 4th grade geometry. Charles Wallace begins to quiz Meg on dimensions, taking her through the first dimension (a line), the second (a square), the third (a three-dimensional square, in which we live), then what’s the fourth:

“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, 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, cloaking it in evil and despair.

In order to release him, the children are going to have to travel first to a lovely planet where Aunt Beast, part of a lovely race of eyeless, psychic, agreeably beast-y creatures serve as their protectors, then to Camazotz, where Dr. Murry is being held, a 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.

Just as in Meg’s small hometown, conformity alone is the face of evil—and knowledge, individual, eccentric knowledge—is a force of good.

This is a grand theme in L’Engle overall, but we see it in full force in the first few chapters of the book, where 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 presumably middle-grade reader is rarely familiar. Even as the children watch the Dark Thing encircle their planet, they are comforted when Mrs. Whatsit tells them that there have been heroes fighting against it throughout history—not swashbucklers with laser guns, but saviors such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Pasteur, and Madame Curie and Einstein, and, for the purists among you, Jesus.

But, if the saviors of Creation are creative thinkers, it’s no surprise that the forces of evil are embodied in a large, red-tinged brain, IT—one whose droning repetition seeks to draw all comers into its Maoist haze. Meg first resists its overwhelming pull first by reciting the periodic table, then the square roots of odd numbers (get it—odd!), and finally, when Charles Wallace is pulled into the great brain, appropriately enough, the Declaration of Independence:

“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 Camazotz. Complete equality. Everybody exactly alike.”

For a moment her brain reeled with confusion. Then came a moment of blazing truth.

“No!” she cried triumphantly. “Likeand equalare not the same thing at all!”

How does Meg defeat evil? She, like the great thinkers before her, has an insight. That’s not her only tool against the big throbbling blob of jelly, though. Among her peers, Meg also has one matchless strength:

“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.

L’Engle has an interesting twist on the nature of knowledge, which is the weapon of choice in A Wrinkle in Time. Charles Wallace thinks his brain power alone can stand against IT, but he’s prideful—and easily overpowered. Calvin, who’s previously teased Meg for her spotty grasp of basics, is also put out of commission by the mighty IT early. Dr. Murry, who, I might remind you, advises the President, was like shooting fish in a barrel. It’s only Meg, who has been castigated by her math teachers for doing problems her way, not theirs; who has no idea where Peru is or who wrote Boswell’s Life of Johnson, who clings stubbornly to her own vast, spotty store of knowledge, that can stand up to IT. Originality, it seems, is its own form of stubbornness—and it’s not enough to know. One must think—for one’s self.

And, because Meg is able to think, she realizes what she can do that IT can’t do—and how she can free Charles Wallace, Calvin, and her father:

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!”

Jeez, now I’M crying. But make no mistake, it’s not Meg’s love that saves Charles Wallace—it’s Meg’s bullheadedness, her insistence on doing things her own way, her belief that she is probably right. Meg isn’t simply a cute narrative depiction of a spunky girl. She’s indubitably, pre-pubescently bullheaded. This fault, because it allows Meg to stand behind her leaps of insight and her outsized love, in A Wrinkle in Time, amounts to no less than a kind of courage. Why, Meg, who laments in everyone else’s secure self-knowledge, turns out to actually has faith in herself—and it’s the kind of faith that can vanquish evil. Reading this book for the 18th time in my pajamas on a Sunday morning, I knew it was unlikely I’d be called upon to save the universe any time soon. But—despite my glasses, temper, flyaway hair, and constant sense of outrage at our benighted world—it was nice to know I’d still have a shot.

Excerpted from SHELF DISCOVERY: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading © Copyright 2011 by Lizzie Skurnick. Reprinted with permission by Avon A, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.

Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading
by by Lizzie Skurnick

  • paperback: 448 pages
  • Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
  • ISBN-10: 0061756350
  • ISBN-13: 9780061756351