MADELEINE L’ENGLE’S A WRINKLE IN TIME is one of those books that I read compulsively as a child, in my under-the-bed fort, smearing the pages with potato chip grease and chocolate. L’Engle’s novel was first published in 1962, well before my time; it was a book that my grandmother had bought for my mother and that she had bought for me, even though she couldn’t quite remember the plot or why she had loved it so much. In A Wrinkle in Time, Meg and Charles Wallace Murry, the children of genius scientists, and their friend Calvin O’Keefe, must travel across the universe and save Meg and Charles Wallace’s father from a darkness that threatens all of existence. In the subsequent books in the series (collectively known as the Time Quintet), Meg travels inside of Charles Wallace’s mitochondria to save him from an inexplicable disease; in A Wind in the Door (1973) and A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), Charles Wallace travels through time on the back of a unicorn to shift a chain of events that would otherwise result in nuclear war; in Many Waters (1986), the Murry twins Sandy and Dennys are transported back to Biblical times, right before the Great Flood; and in An Acceptable Time (1989), Meg and Calvin’s daughter (spoiler alert, they get married) Polly is trapped in pre-Columbian Connecticut after accidentally slipping through time while visiting her grandparents.

A Wrinkle in Time is part of a subgenre of young adult literature in which ordinary, plain children are called upon to do brave, incredible things with the help of newfound powers, and then, inevitably grow up to be extraordinary, attractive adults. In my solitary fort, I ate it up (along with the chips and chocolate). I was Hermione Granger, frizzy-haired and mocked and too smart for my own good. I was Bastian Balthazar Bux from The Neverending Story, chubby and lonely and transported into an epic adventure through the pages of a book. I was Meg Murry, bespectacled, outcast, and misunderstood. Superimposing myself onto Meg, I tessered across the universe with witches who quoted Shakespeare, flew on the back of an angel, fought against the Black Thing shadowing Earth, saved my father and brother from a giant brain that turned people into living automatons, and was cradled in the arms of a kindly fur-covered tentacle beast. I grappled with my own fears, of losing my parents, of being unpopular, of the world ending. I thought about good and evil, about conformity and difference, about love and hate and the existence of God. (A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels, like The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, has been read as Christian allegory, drawing upon biblical themes and sometimes quoting the Bible directly, though it is accessible to readers of any background.) Rereading L’Engle’s classic today, I am astounded by the work that young-adult literature can do, the sophisticated places it takes our minds before we’re old enough to realize just what is happening.

Nonetheless, I have to admit that the text of A Wrinkle in Time, in some ways, has aged about as well as the yellowing, dog-eared pages of my paperback copy. I couldn’t help but laugh aloud at Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace’s Cold War era terror when they encounter a room full of “great computing machines” like the ones “Meg had seen in h...