Nose in a Book

A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle

The third book in L’Engle’s Time Quartet.  I remember loving these books as a child.  I didn’t like this one as much as the first two this time around.  I still enjoyed it but I still like A Wrinkle in Time the best.

This book has skipped a lot of time since the last one.  Meg is now pregnant with her first child and Charles Wallace is 15.  As they are all enjoying Thanksgiving dinner, Mr. Murry receives a phone call from the president informing him that a South American dictator plans on starting a nuclear war the next day.  The Murry family spends the rest of their evening worrying about the end of the world as they know it.  After they all go to bed, Charles Wallace and Meg (through kything – a kind of mind to mind communication.  She just stays in her warm bed with the dog the whole time.) travel through time making small changes that they hope will change the future and prevent the nuclear war.

Each of the times they visit are almost like short stories and I’m still not sure how I felt about this.  The characters in each time were all descendants and ancestors of each other and their names were the same or similar in each story.  Also, they didn’t appear in chronological order and I have to admit I found it a little hard to keep everybody straight.

Even though time travel is a huge part of this novel, I found it to be less science fiction-y (is that a word?  It is now!!) than the previous two which is something that I loved about them.  I also found the good vs. evil theme to be more subtle in this one (still it’s not that subtle) and somehow I liked the more obvious approach in the first two.  And lastly, it wasn’t really about the Murry’s because Charles Wallace actually goes “Within” (becomes a part of the individual) the other characters in the story.  And I like the Murry’s.  I don’t typically choose character driven stories over plot driven ones but in this case, I’ve fallen for this family and I wanted to read more about them.

After having said all that, it probably sounds like I didn’t like the book at all but actually I did.  In fact, as a childhood favourite I think it stands up pretty good to the adult reading.  It’s just in the comparison to the other books in the series that it doesn’t do so well (for me)!  I can’t wait until I can read these books to my seven year old.  We started reading A Wrinkle in Time about a year ago and it was a little bit over his head but I think that he might be getting there.  I’m almost afraid to read him some of my childhood favourites because I’m worried he won’t love them as much as I did!

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Madeleine L'Engle