Review: A Wrinkle in Time (Graphic Novel)

I never actually read A Wrinkle in Time, but the graphic novel was easily checked out electronically from the local library, so I picked it up and plowed through it in a few hours. It's a throwback to the 1960s, in both political context and in tone.

The story revolves around Meg, whose physicist father has disappeared for an unknown reason, but the mystical old woman living in a haunted house somehow has the answer. When I got to the explanation of the tesseract, I realized that this was probably the novel that inspired all the science fiction stories/illustrated novels that I'd read in the 1980s, meaning that the book is influential enough that the "space travel by a folding of space-time" is now a trope and the explanation and illustrations that accompany it are somewhat common.

The emotional part of the story is familiar to many of us, but is still told quite well, and definitely worth introducing to kids. The spiritual aspects of the story including the biblical quotes feel very much out of place, mostly because the Christianity that's often in media and politics today is no longer associated with physics, science, math, or compassion, but it's quite likely that a child approaching the comic without having to spend too much time dealing with evangelicals might not have the same association as I do.

Bowen probably won't get very far with this book because he doesn't seem to like  fiction, but perhaps if I tell him it has math in it I might fool him into reading it and getting the emotional maturity part.

The art in the comic is decent. It's all in black and white, and at the right level of abstraction. All in all, entertaining and worth your time. Recommended.