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When a stranger appeared at Meg Murry’s door on a dark and stormy night, her entire life changed. In turn, Madeleine L’Engle’s 1963 classic A WRINKLE IN TIME changed thousands of readers' of lives, as well.

Praised for its fantastical plot, rife with tesseracts and the lovable Mrs. W's, its realistic characters and its delicate balance of whimsy and heart, A WRINKLE OF TIME is not free from criticism. It comes in at #90 on the American Library Association’s 2000-2009 list of Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books and has been cited for everything from offensive language to “Satanic undertones.”

Below, YA author Leila Sales (THIS SONG WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE, TONIGHT THE STREETS ARE OURS) and Teen Board member Alison S. challenge the challengers, explaining why they love A WRINKLE IN TIME and would recommend it to readers everywhere.

Do you remember when you read this book for the first time? How old were you? Did you read it for school or for pleasure?

Leila Sales: I remember being eight or nine years old and reading A WRINKLE IN TIME with my mother. It was definitely for pleasure!

Alison S.: I was 10 or 11 when I first read A WRINKLE IN TIME. Although I read the novel for pleasure, I remember ordering my copy from the Scholastic catalog my elementary school sent home on a monthly-ish basis. I read this book in June, on the brink of summer vacation, and remember flying through it in a few days. After I finished, I gushed about this novel to my mom, practically begging her to read it. My 10-year-old self even positioned the novel strategically in back of her desk, where I knew she’d see it. And when behind-the-desk failed to snag her attention, I even insisted she keep the book in her bedroom.

What do you like about this book, and how would you persuade somebody else to read it?

LS: It's one of the most imaginative books I've ever read. It fits so much creativity into so few pages. It makes you want to know more and be smarter: it makes you feel like there's more to the universe than you'd ever thought about and it makes you want to discover as much as you can. And it's a book about love, ultimately, about how love and individuality can save the day against the forces of conformity and evil. Every time I read the climactic scene where Meg realizes that "she could stand there and she could love Charles Wallace," I tear up. And I've read it a LOT of times.

AS: First of all, I adore Madeleine L’Engle’s narrative voice. At the beginning of the novel, Meg doesn’t exactly inspire admiration in readers (unless, of course, you happen to admire people who whine about the weather and vent their sorrows to oversized teddy bears). Though L’Engle never glorifies Meg’s immaturity or refusal to take responsibility for her actions, the narrator never allows these character flaws to overshadow Meg’s fierce devotion to her family or insightful perspective on life. In the world of YA lit, most teenage girls have already launched a rebellion against a totalitarian regime or kissed eternity’s hottest vampire/werewolf/wizard (or both!) by the time their Meg’s age. So L’Engle’s acknowledgement and ---gasp --- acceptance of teen angst, teen insecurity and teen moodiness always felt refreshingly welcoming to my angsty, insecure, moody adolescent self. Sure, Meg might not be a heroic rebel fighter or leather-clad secret agent or long-lost vampire princess, but she’s accessible. When Meg becomes a hero, every angsty, painfully mediocre middle-schooler (cough cough *myself* cough cough) becomes a hero right along with her.

Hmm, how to persuade readers to give this underrated classic a chance? Well, my 10-year-old self tried positioning the book strategically around my mom’s office and --- when that didn’t work --- bedroom (yes, I really was that invasive). And in the last seven years, my powers of persuasion haven’t exactly flourished. Luckily, Madeleine L’Engle already did the persuading for me. If I wanted my friend to read A WRINKLE IN TIME, I’d just flip to the first page and shove the book into her line of sight. Once she glimpses L’Engle’s homey, relatable narration, persuasion won’t be necessary. Plus, a tyrannical brain in a vat never fails to excite readerly interest.

The Former Head of Branch Libraries at the University of Maryland said that A WRINKLE IN TIME "…[sends] a mixed signal to children about good and evil." If you had the chance to respond to that quote, what would you say? 

LS: There SHOULD be mixed signals about good and evil. Because good and evil are complicated. Most people are good people who sometimes do bad things. To break the world into two like that --- there's good and there's evil and never the two shall meet --- is reductionist and silly.

Another objection I once read about A WRINKLE IN TIME was from a parent-objector in Rialto, California, who in 1991 called it, "A frightening book.... [It] makes you believe in make-believe." And what is wrong with that? Why on earth would we want a population of people --- especially children --- who don't believe in anything more than exactly what they see in front of their eyes?

AS: I won’t deny that this novel portrays morality as a complex, even confusing concept. In this multi-faceted view of ethics, you can’t always cleanly peel apart good and evil like ribbons of string cheese. You might call this ethical grayness “mixed signals”; I call it honesty. Unfortunate as it is, the real world abounds in moral uncertainty, and real life isn’t one to shy away from moral “trick questions.” Just look at the food industry. Large-scale mega-farms lower the price of food and prevent impoverished families from starving. In order to keep costs low, however, many factory farms ignore their livestock’s basic physical and psychological needs. Libraries should encourage young readers to explore complex, or “mixed,” depictions of good and evil. How will children learn to navigate the moral uncertainty of the real world if they can’t even encounter ethical ambiguity in the fictional one?

You need to give the protagonist of this book a book recommendation. What would you recommend, and why?

LS: CODE NAME VERITY by Elizabeth Wein because it is a really good book about love for smart girls (which Meg Murry definitely is).

AS: Even in a parallel world governed by giant throbbing brains, the archetypical Murry family bridges the fantastic and the painfully real. Yes, Meg journeys through alternate dimensions, but she also agonizes over lackluster grades and schoolyard bullies. Whenever I admire L’Engle’s surreal melding of imaginary terrors and all-too-realistic ones, I can’t help but think of Kafka’s THE METAMORPHOSIS. Kafka’s pitch dark, fairy tale-esque novella of a self-loathing salesman transforming into a bug certainly veers into the fantastic. Kafka’s emphasis on household chores (specifically, cleaning the apartment), however, ground the story in daily life.

L’Engle and Kafka’s mutual love of genre-bending aside, I’d still recommend THE METAMORPHOSIS to Meg. When I read Kafka’s iconic novella, I couldn’t miss the very real warning underlying the very fantastic fable. Believing your “haters” can, according to Kafka, transform their hollow insults into truth. Believe the bullies calling you a failure, and you’ll probably fail. Believe the ungrateful father calling you a repulsive vermin, and you’ll probably turn into a repulsive vermin. As a middle-school girl fixated on all the ways she’s “failed,” Meg could definitely use the warning against turning idle taunts into self-fulfilling prophecy.