Feature: On the Eve of Returning to Hawkins with A Wrinkle in Time

The day before Volume 2 of Stranger Things drops feels like the right time to talk about A Wrinkle in Time (specifically the graphic novel edition) which I read to prep for Vol 2. Many thanks to Macmillan for putting us all in a buddy read and sending the book!

Seeing A Wrinkle in Time in panels instead of prose makes the darkness feel closer. Less theoretical. More oppressive. The conformity, the control, the way safety is offered as a reward for obedience; all of it lands harder when you can see it closing in. The colors in this book really sell that.

Meg has never been a neat hero. She’s impatient. She gets angry. She doubts herself constantly. And that’s the point. She doesn’t win because she’s brave in the traditional sense. She wins because she refuses to smooth herself down into something easier to manage. Love, in this story, isn’t gentle or poetic. It’s messy and stubborn and chosen again and again.

That’s where the Stranger Things connection keeps tugging at me. As we head into Volume 2, I’m hoping the show leans into some of the same ideas that make A Wrinkle in Time endure, like villains who don’t just threaten, but tempt, power structures that promise peace in exchange for sameness (ahem), characters whose differences are framed as liabilities (until they’re not…), and victories that cost something real (but pls not Steve Harrington).

The Upside Down has always worked best when it isn’t just a monster factory, but a pressure; something that asks characters who they’re willing to be when fear would make it easier to disappear.

Reading A Wrinkle in Time this way was a reminder that stories about kids facing impossible darkness don’t need to be slick or shocking to be unsettling. Sometimes the scariest idea is being told everything would be fine if you’d just stop resisting. That feels like a message we need rigth now.

Tomorrow, we go back to Hawkins. Today felt like a good moment to remember a story that’s been asking the same questions for decades.

A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel

by Hope Larson, Madeleine L'Engle
Published by: Margaret Ferguson Books
on October 2, 2012
Genres: Graphic Novel
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Late one night, three otherworldly creatures appear and sweep Meg Murry, her brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O'Keefe away on a mission to save Mr. Murry, who has gone missing while doing top-secret work for the government. They travel via tesseract — a wrinkle that transports one across space and time — to the planet Camazotz, where Mr. Murry is being held captive. There they discover a dark force that threatens not only Mr. Murry but the safety of the whole universe.
Never before illustrated, A Wrinkle in Time is now available in a spellbinding graphic novel adaptation. Hope Larson takes the classic story to a new level with her vividly imagined interpretations of Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, Mrs Which, the Happy Medium, Aunt Beast, and the many other characters that readers have loved for the past fifty years. Winner of the 1963 Newbery Medal, A Wrinkle in Time is the first book in Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quintet.