A SWIFTLY TILTING PLANET

This has always been my favorite entry in Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quartet, and I’ve probably read it more times than all the other books combined. Mostly it’s because I’m a sucker for time travel and all its altering-the-future-by-influencing-the-past complexities. Also because it has a unicorn, and no little girl of the 1980s could resist a unicorn. But on this latest reread, I’ll admit I was less enchanted. The story of Charles Wallace saving the world from nuclear war on Thanksgiving by entering a series of interlinked stories in the past is cleverly suspenseful and all, but maybe…a little cheesily mystical in parts? And I gotta say, there’s a major logic hole for me in the concept that one could stop an evil dictator by going back in time and changing who his ancestors were. In this book, some people are super-good and others are just plain bad, and the good people have good descendents and the bad people have bad ones, which is at best oversimplistic and at worst smacks alarmingly of eugenics, and it kept bothering me the more I thought about it. There’s still a lot to love here—especially the present-day scenes with the always-adorable Murrys—but this may be one of my few childhood faves that holds up less well under adult scrutiny. Still, it does include a kitten, so bonus points there.