I never read this one when I was a kid, so I was coming at it completely fresh. And, at first, I thought it was making a difference in my reception of the book, because, at first, I was really enjoying it. The first third of the book was really good. I was impressed and everything.Yes, there will be spoilers.This one is two years after Wrinkle; Charles Wallace is in school and is having difficulties fitting in. He also thinks he's found a dragon in his brothers' garden. The first part of the book deals with the search for this dragon, and all of that section is interesting and enthralling. Including finding the "dragon," which turns out to be a cherubim. That spouts fire. I'm still not clear on why the cherubim spouted fire, but it did. We also meet Blajeny, a giant obsidian dude who is some kind of Teacher.And that's where the book starts to fall apart. The first thing, which could be overlooked if it was the only thing, is that Calvin just happens to show up as Meg sneaks out to go looking for, well, she doesn't know what she's looking for. In fact, there's no clear reason why she sneaks out of the house. Here's the conundrum: It's after bedtime. Meg sneaks out, which is not the issue; the issue is that Calvin just shows up. Sure, he has his own reason for being there but, ostensibly, he should know that it's after the Murry children's bedtime, so why is he coming over to their house when Meg and Charles Wallace are expected to be asleep?The next real issue is Blajeny. He's supposed to be a "Teacher," a term which is never really explained and, I suppose, shouldn't need to be explained except that he never teaches or does anything like teaching. What he does is announce to Meg that he is there to be her Teacher and that she will have three trials. So this is his method of teaching, to announce that she will have trials but, oh, he can't tell her what they will be or how to overcome them. He will, though, giver her the cherubim, Proginoskes, as a partner but, no, he doesn't know what the trials will be, either. This is another one of those tropes that I am overly tired of. And, well, how would Blajeny even know how many trials there would be if he didn't know what they would be, something he admits later. Basically, this was some ordeal he, some very powerful cosmic being, couldn't fix himself and needed Meg, a teenager, to do it for him.Most of the rest of the book is torture. As soon as they get to the first trial, which is to determine the real Mr. Jenkins... Okay, hold on a moment. There was this scene in Wrinkle with Mr. Jenkins where he is questioning Meg about the whereabouts of her father. He seems to have an overly intense curiosity about it. Meg even wonders why Mr. Jenkins cares, basically, calls attention to the behavior to the reader, then... nothing. The character doesn't enter the book again, and I was left wondering what the heck that was all about. When he turned up in Wind, I thought, "Oh! We'll get to find out what Jenkins is up to" But no. Jenkins is up to nothing except being lame.So, okay, Meg has to figure out which is the real Mr. Jenkins because he's been copied by fallen angels called Echthroi who want to X existence. But to start with, they want to X Charles Wallace. Yes, the "X"ing is how it is put in the book. They want to X everything. Why they copied Mr. Jenkins is never explained and has no logic to it other than a contrivance because Meg hates Jenkins but has been put into a position where she has to save him. What we get, then, is two chapters of Meg whining about how she can't do it and Proginoskes telling her she has to or he will X himself. They just kept going around and around that argument:"I can't do it.""You have to.""I can't.""Then I will fail the trial and will have to X myself.""No, you can't do that.""Then you have to choose." (Or, as they said in the book, she had to Name him.)"I can't do it."OH MY GOSH! Seriously! I needed two chapters of that! (More than 30 pages in the edition I read (nearly 1/5 of the book).)And once they get through that? Well, Jenkins joins their little team and we spend most of the rest of the book bouncing back and forth between him and Meg both going on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about how they can't do whatever it is they need to do. Oh, yes, and Jenkins asking to just be sent back to Earth. "I'm no good. Why am I even here? Just send me back." Or something to that effect.Not to mention that, again, the person (Blajeny in this one) provided who should be able to answer questions and explain what's going on and what to do and all of that fails to answer any questions and leaves them on their own to figure out what to do. Which, you know, sometimes is what you need to do with kids but not when someone's life is in the balance. It would be like coming up on a car accident and the ambulance is there, but the EMT tells you to take care of it instead then refuses to answer any questions about what you should do and, in fact, wanders off when you're focused on the guy bleeding out.Mostly, I have found these books, so far, to be a place for L'Engle to dangle her ideas and philosophies with not enough story to really make the books worthwhile. Both books have focused on love as major plot device (the climax of the Wrinkle being Meg saving her brother by, basically, saying "I love you"). The message, then, of A Wind in the Door is that love is an action, not a feeling, and that's something I agree with, but I don't need 50 pages of anguish over it. I also don't need half of the book explaining and re-explaining "kything."So, as I said last time, these books may be great for kids, but I'm just not being able to get into them as an adult. There are too many shortcuts and too many devices without reason and not enough answers both to the questions the characters have and the questions that I have as a reader. If you loved these as a kid, cherish that, but don't try to go back to them now. If you never read them, it's probably better to just not.
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature. Life's too short to read bad books!http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi...When I was a kid, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time blew my mind. I’m sure that’s why I remember it as one of my favorite childhood books. Reading it gave me the first inkling of the immenseness of the universe and that the concepts of space and time were much more complicated than I had realized. I think it was also the book that started my life-long love of science fiction. Before that, I had no idea that I loved having my mind blown! It’s surprising then that I never read the sequels to A Wrinkle in Time. I don’t think I was aware of them until years later and then I probably thought of them as children’s books and passed them by. That was a big mistake which I’ve now corrected.The first sequel, published eleven years later (in 1973) is A Wind in the Door. Meg is now in high school and Mr. Jenkins, the principal she so much dislikes, has been demoted to run the school that Meg’s little brother Charles Wallace attends. Meg is angry with Mr. Jenkins because he can’t control the bullies who are ganging up on Charles. Meanwhile Charles has become sickly and Meg’s mother, a microbiologist with two PhDs, suspects there’s something wrong with his mitochondria, the organelles that provide our cells’ energy. She theorizes the existence of even smaller cellular elements called farandolae (these are not real) that live in the mitochondria and are, in Charles Wallace’s case, being destroyed. As Charles languishes, Meg, Mr. Jenkins and a cherubim named Proginoskes go on a journey that they hope will save his life because, according to what they learn, if Charles dies, the whole world, and maybe even the universe, will be in danger. For there is an epic battle between the forces of good and evil and little Charles Wallace is a key player.A Wind in the Door is a children’s story, but it’s full of the same kind of mind-expanding science fiction ideas and mature philosophical themes that I experienced when I first read A Wrinkle in Time. In addition to addressing the complexities of time, including whether time really has any meaning at all outside of our planet, L’Engle attempts to give us a feeling for the vastness of the universe by comparing and contrasting the size of our galaxy with the size of the organelles in our cells. She shows us that not only are we ignorant of what goes on in our universe, but the same is true for what goes on in the bodies we inhabit.As with A Wrinkle in Time, there is a definite but subtle religious (Christian) subtext to the story, too. (L’Engle was a Christian.) The struggle going on in the cells of Charles Wallace’s body is a metaphor for the greater struggle between good and evil. The epic evil of the story is in the form of creatures called Echthroi which appear to be fallen angels. The good force is the creator of the universe which we can assume is the Christian God because there are a couple of Biblical quotations and several Biblical concepts such as the creation singing of its creator, the importance and power of love as an action (not just a feeling), the idea that people are everlasting souls that are known and “named” by God and that they can grow in spiritual maturity, the idea that people who seem insignificant to the world can greatly impact its future, and the notion that a sacrifice can be redemptive.Many younger children will not pick up on all these ideas and will likely find some of the contemplative parts too slow, but most children will be able to get something out of the story such as the important message that a person’s appearance and mannerisms are not as important as what’s inside, and that love is a choice we can make.Jennifer Ehle narrates Listening Library’s audio version of A Wind in the Door. My daughter and I enjoyed her performance and look forward to hearing her read the next book, A Swiftly Tilting Planet.
What do You think about A Wind In The Door (1976)?
It's a book that you understand more as an adult then as a child. As a child, you'd lose most of the points made of it, simply because it's too erudite. Charles Williams is sick, and is also seeing dragons by his house. Meg has to save him, along with some very unlikely companions.Again, L'Engle is a fine, creative writer. But there are a lot of the same problems in the first book. Charles Williams simply is unrealistic, and again, he is the focal point of this novel, the macGuffin. He's a six year old who knows what mitochondriae are, whose double PhD mother reads to him books on theoretical physics for a bed time story, reads Charles Darwin, and who knows how to finish a quotation from the poet Robert Burns. This is a first grader, mind you. One wonders if he eats or sleeps, or just shovels information in his head from day to night. L'Engle tries to lampshade it some with him getting picked on in school, but he is one of the hardest children's book characters I have ever tried to care about. Meg is, well, Meg. The universe seems to view her as the dedicated "Rescue Charles Williams" squad. She's a winsome character, and well made. But all she ever seems to do is get put in absurd situations where literally God expects her to fight universal menaces through seriously outlandish means. She's 13: she should be shy around Calvin and deciding what she wants to be, not constantly protesting when yet another supernatural being swings by and throws trials at her.The plot. Well. Look, I enjoy Christian themes in children's fiction, despite being an agnostic. I also appreciate what she is trying to do, and as an adult, there are some rich themes you can reflect on and enjoy. But it's just not going to affect children the same way. It's too abstract and metaphysical, and is similar very much to Out of the Silent Planet in terms of a cosmic theology. But most of it is just going to roll off of any but the most educated child, and even then I doubt it, because they don't have the life experience to understand it.The plot is also bad because of the needless jargon and abilities. Kytheing. Xed. She likes long passages of internal trials and these slow down the utterly striking images she can show on occasion. Meg doubts dragons despite in the last book seeing angels and space traveling to fight an evil computer. There's a big to-do about Naming, but the ultimate resolution is as weak as the first book with what they actually do. There is talk about Teachers, but little to no explanation: they act as plot devices.I know I'm harsh on her, but this is a children's book that doesn't seem to be written to children. It's better than a Wrinkle in Time in that she tries to make them more human, and the book a little less intellectual. There's no Mrs. Whatsit referencing Pascal and quoting in Greek, and Calvin doesn't grill Meg on who wrote the Life of Boswell. But you never see any of the children play, or do much of the things children do. I would think it closer to Watership Down as a book that we expect children to read, but when we come back to it at adults we find we miss the entire point of it, and have to read it with fresh eyes. Watership down is not about rabbits, but death. A Wind in the Door is not about Dragons, but about how loving someone means truly knowing who they are, and who you are. As a children's book, it's a failure except as a seed. As an adult reads it, it flowers. Still, since it's a children's book, I have to give it two stars.
—D.M. Dutcher
Once again, I am in awe of Madeleine L'Engle. She has a knack for writing parable-esque stories that are thrilling, compelling, and completely original.This story deals with the Ecthroi, a group of beings who only exist to cause things to be Xed (X-ing is causing something to be void, to cease to exist.) The reality of these awful beings is brought home to the main character, Meg, when her younger brother, Charles Wallace, is taken ill. His condition is caused by Ecthroi that have disrupted the rhythm of his mitochondria. Farandolae, according to L'Engle, are what cause the mitochondria to continue functioning and producing energy, but they are being convinced by the Echthroi that they don't need to participate in keeping the cell alive. Personal freedom (that is, freedom to die) has been placed at the center of their lives, and it seems that Charles Wallace will die unless Meg, a cherub, and two friends, can help the Farandolae within remember why a Name is essential.I will leave it to you to read all the specifics. I can't summarize very well with this stuff. Reading books like this makes me so jealous. How can Madeleine L'Engle make the issues of life and death, belief and unbelief, identity and non-identity, so incredibly clear? In this story, we become attached to the characters, we see what they're thinking, and we imagine what we would do in their situation. And, speaking for myself, I have to look at the book and literally be awestruck by the magnificence of what I've read. L'Engle has a great gift for making us care about questions that, in any other context, we avoid. Many people without my Christian faith will have read this book, and it will still make them think about the questions that matter:Is there some great scheme out there that I'm trying to avoid? Am I placing myself at the center of my universe and causing myself to die? Am I giving in to lies from Echthroi-like things?I love this book. Discovering what is in a name, whether distance or size matters, and learning to love those you never thought possible are things I want to keep thinking about.On to the next book!
—Amy
I was slightly disspointed upon reading A Wind in the Door. I adore and loved A Wrinkle in Time when I read it, and I was expecting something as wonderful and beautiful as that.Although this book is good, and is thoughtful, it lacked more of the relationships that I loved in the first book in the Time Series. I love Calvin and Meg together, and though there were some cute thoughts and things, not very many. There was also hardly any Charles Wallace, which left me a sense of a missing piece after I finished the book.Another thing that I found annoying was how long the paragraphs were, and how sometimes I just felt like skimming the whole page for anything that seemed interesting, because the rest of it was just reiteration of things previously stated. It felt sometimes like I was hearing over and over again what I'd already heard, and not in a way that was working. But all in all, it was still good, and worth the read, because you must read this one to read the next one, so its still good, if that makes any sense at all:)
—Sarah Augustinsky
