A Wrinkle in Time

A Wrinkle in Time won the Newbery Medal and was named one of Time's 100 best fantasy books ever written, credentials that undersell how strange this book actually is: Madeleine L'Engle sends Meg Murry, her brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin across the universe by tesseract, a fold in space and time, guided by three otherworldly women named Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which, on a mission to find Meg's missing father. Farrar, Straus and Giroux's edition runs 260 pages and holds a 4-star average from 94 Google ratings.

The science-fiction machinery is really in service of a much more personal story: Meg is stubborn, impatient, and convinced there's something wrong with her, and the plot spends its length proving that those exact qualities are what let her succeed where a more agreeable hero would fail. Facing the Black Thing, a cosmic force bent on flattening everyone into identical conformity, the book keeps circling back to the idea that love and staying stubbornly yourself are the real defenses that matter. For a kid who already feels like the odd one out in their family or classroom, watching Meg's specific brand of difficult turn out to be exactly what's needed is the part of this book that tends to stick.