THE WIND IN THE DOOR

The second step in my quest to read all of Madeleine L’Engle. For some reason I didn’t own this one as a child, and only read it about half as much as A Wrinkle in Time or my then-favorite, A Swiftly Tilting Planet. Something about it seemed boring to me, which is odd because now I think I almost like it even better than Wrinkle; the characters are more developed, the themes are more complex, there’s more action, and I love Mr. Jenkins and Proginoskes—although the climactic sequence when the characters are disembodied within Charles Wallace’s mitochondria gets a little long and abstract and weird, so that I kept envisioning it rendered in trippy 1970s animation. Perhaps that’s what turned me off of the book as a kid; I was easily creeped out by surrealism. Anyway, great book. I’m excited to be tackling the whole series.