![]() ![]() One advised to “do a cutting job on it-by half.” Another complained “it’s something between an adult and juvenile novel.” Finally, a friend advised L’Engle to send it to one of the most prestigious houses of all, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Every firm her agent turned to rejected the manuscript. “If it’s not good enough for adults,” she once wrote, “it’s not good enough for children.” L’Engle believed that literature should show youngsters they were capable of taking on the forces of evil in the universe, not just the everyday pains of growing up. While Meg Murry and her companions traveled through time and space to save her father, a scientist trapped by evil forces on a distant planet, readers had to wrap their minds around the fifth dimension, the horrors of conformity and the power of love. Then came L’Engle, a 41-year-old writer who spent three months in 1959 writing the hard-to-categorize story that would become A Wrinkle in Time. Tolkien in Britain but in the States were relegated to pulp magazines and drugstore paperbacks. Leonard Marcus, author of the L’Engle biography Listening for Madeleine, says Wrinkle “set the stage for the reception of Harry Potter in this country.” Previously, he says, science fiction and fantasy were suitable for high-end British authors like C.S. The book also kicked open the door for other bright young heroines and the amazingly lucrative franchises they appear in, from whip-smart Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter books to lethal Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games. Since its 1962 publication, Wrinkle has sold more than ten million copies and been turned into a graphic novel, an opera and two films, including an ambitious adaptation from the director Ava DuVernay due out in March. What’s different about Roy is that her grandmother happened to be Madeleine L’Engle, the book’s author, who revolutionized serious young adult fiction with her clever mash-up of big ideas, science fantasy and adventure-and a geeky girl action hero way ahead of her time. ![]() ![]() ![]() Millions of other adolescent girls (and boys) have made the same liberating discovery while reading A Wrinkle in Time. “It was almost like your permission to be a real person,” Roy says. She felt just like the hotheaded, stubborn heroine Meg Murry, and took comfort in the fact that a flawed adolescent girl could save the world. After school, Léna ran to her grandmother’s house, which was around the corner from her school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, to finish the book on her own. Witty wordplay, spectacular surprises, and a mismatched cast of comical characters make this raucous mystery an all-time classic.When Léna Roy was 7 years old, her teacher read the first chapter of A Wrinkle in Time aloud to her second-grade class. But are the heirs really competing against each other, or against Sam Westing himself? There's 200 million dollars and an empire of paper products at stake. Bombs will go off, secret identities will be revealed, and shins will be kicked. The game is on, and the suspicious heirs try to outwit each other and uncover all the pieces of the puzzle. Together the clues point to the murderer. The heirs (and the mistake) are broken up into pairs, with each team receiving a clue. They've all come to stake their claim to the Westing fortune, but instead of an inheritance, they get some stunning news: one of them is Sam Westing's murderer, and the entire fortune will go to the heir who solves the crime! It's an odd assortment of heirs-there's an inventor, a track star, a bird watcher, a bomber, a burglar, and…a mistake. Sixteen people have been invited to the reading of eccentric millionaire Samuel W. ![]()
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