Madeleine L'Engle

Supreme writer of fantasy, Newberry Medalist - Madeline L'Engle - died recently at 88. She once said "You have to write whichever book it is that wants to be written. And then, if it's going to be too difficult for grown-ups, you write it for children." It was her A Wrinkle in Time which won the Newberry Award.This is one of my all-time favourite books, and I read it to my daughter when she was eight. After the first reading she remarked 'I like books where people have troubles and then they have adventures.'It was only I who cried when Meg saves Charles Wallace from IT by loving his true self (as I have every reading - even writing this makes me teary!) She just patted me clumsily on the knee. Was it too old for her? No I don't think so - merely that she wasn't moved to tears by stories as often as her mother.However it seemed that the deepest influence of the story was in thinking about how appearances and nature can differ. Over dinner a week after finishing it, she said:
'You know A Wrinkle in Time - that world with the beasts?' [Yes] 'That was really to show that however ugly they seemed, they could still be kind.' This was clearly a reference back to a discussion some months before. We had been talking about extra-terrestrials, their probable appearance and nature - just because they look strange they don't have to be bad. Her little brother (nearly 5) had remarked rather perceptively that 'baddies never win, even though they're monsters', and she had been quick to point out that to them we would look like the monsters.Read more about my son and daughter and their responses to books from birth to eight in Stories, Pictures and Reality: Two children tell (Routledge 2007).

View this post on my blog: http://www.yourgamebook.com/madeleine-lengle.html