By Madeleine L'Engle
A girl who feels out of place travels across space and time to rescue her missing scientist father from a darkness bent on making everyone think and act exactly alike.
Meg Murry is angry most of the time. Her father, a scientist, has been gone more than a year, and the adults around her either won't say where or don't know themselves. One stormy night three strange old women turn up and tell her the truth: he'd been experimenting with a way to fold space and time called a tesseract, and now he's stranded on a distant planet that a spreading darkness has swallowed. Meg goes after him, traveling clear across the universe with her younger brother Charles Wallace, who is five and unnervingly bright, and a schoolmate named Calvin.
This is where the trail steps into real science fiction: folded time, distant planets, physics the book doesn't water down. The sentences run longer and denser than the rungs just below it, and a child ready for a stretch will feel it. Underneath the ideas, though, the story is warm and steadying. Meg is prickly, awkward, and sure she's a disappointment, and the book hands her a rescue that only her stubbornness and her temper can pull off. The very things she hates about herself are what save her father. For a child who feels like the odd one out, it can land hard.