Sort of a Review: A Wind in the Door (Madeleine L’Engle)

When something terrible happens, as It often does, I find myself reaching for things I used to love. I have always been a bit of a hoarder. My desk is buried in notebooks I’ve kept since the 4th grade, stones from beaches around the world, bottle openers that I haven’t used since I’ve been sober, and a lip balm that expired in 2009. I hold onto things because I don’t want to forget, even if remembering hurts. There isn’t enough space in my head for all the things I need to know, so I have expanded outwards, spilling the excess of me across my office, my small San Francisco apartment, into my notebooks, on my laptop, and folded into my stories. 

When I was a kid, my favorite book was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, and since this month has, for the lack of a better term, sucked ass so bad, I decided to finally read the second book in the series, A Wind in the Door. Meg Murry’s little brother, and famous Charles Wallace, falls deathly ill after seeing dragons in the vegetable garden. In order to save him, Meg, Calvin, and a cast of bizarre and whimsical characters travel deep inside Charles Wallace, beyond the cellular level, to defeat the evil Echthroi and restore harmony in the universe.  

I am unsure if I would have liked this book as a child, but as an adult, it was comforting to read about real and painful things in children’s fiction’s soft and silky language. In one of my favorite scenes, Meg is confronted with three identical copies of her terrible teacher Mr. Jenkins. In order to pass a trial and move forward in her quest to save her brother, Meg has to “name” the correct Mr. Jenkins, thereby making him, in a way, real. L’Engle plays poetically with the ideas of memory, love, microbiology, and cosmic powers, both enormous and unfathomably small. Like most children’s fiction, the world is simplified into a clearly defined good and evil, with the characters having the power to tilt the balance in one way or another. It is a sweet, thoughtful book. It made me happy.