Rindis.com

A Wrinkle in Time hits several time-honored traditions of the YA novel. Of course, it helped establish some of them. Meg is the outsider at school, she can’t help being a bit different, and can’t find the patience to do things the way others want. Children get to take a central role in saving the world (or at least a world). And there’s the convenient arrive right after you left bit from Narnia.

There is a lack of detail in many places. The description of a tesseract (a four-dimensional object) is confused; there’s a stopover on a two-dimensional world, which would put it out of our universe, but… well. Just how a tesseract can get one across the universe isn’t explained (there are some actual theories that relate to it, but nothing is given in the book), much less how any of this got out of pure mathematics. Going at all deeply into it would bog down the book to no end, but it does make the story feel like it has little foundation, especially as there’s no feeling that the author has it worked out in her head.

There are more serious problems. Meg does not feel like she has a lot of agency in parts of the book. Where she does act is important, but there’s a fair amount of dragging around.

However, the overall story and themes are very good, and carry all these weak points without trouble. Meg’s troubles are reflected in Camazotz where everyone is the same, and everything happens on a precise schedule. (Really, that part is extremely effectively creepy.)

So, yes… the book is worth a recommendation. At the same time, I feel that Diane Duane’s So You Want to Be a Wizard takes the same starting elements and delivers a much superior story, so I recommend it instead.