YMMV / A Wrinkle in Time

• Alternative Character Interpretation: A commentator on Mari Ness' Madeleine L'Engle reread for Wrinkle argues that Meg's character shows a "far better portrayal of a profoundly gifted child than Charles Wallace was."
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The stop on/in the two-dimensional planet.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Aunt Beast. A furry alien with tentacles who is eyeless, only communicates telepathically, looks like a Lovecraftian Eldritch Abomination ... and has bottomless love and empathy for Meg, part of a race that's battling for their very lives on the side of the light. She only appears in the last quarter of the book but makes a heck of an impression. She's so popular a lot of fans decided not to see the 2018 film version when they found out Aunt Beast was cut.
• First Installment Wins:
  • Ever heard of A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, or Many Waters? None of them got Newbery medals. Some of this may have to do with the fact that most elementary or middle schools tend to make A Wrinkle in Time required reading at some point but not so much the others. And thus, the first book tends to be more ingrained in peoples' memories. Though A Swiftly Tilting Planet did win the American Book Award in 1980.
  • For that matter, even if fans have heard of the other three books, how many know that the series has a second-generation? The Arm of the Starfish, Dragons in the Waters, A House Like a Lotus, and An Acceptable Time center around Meg and Calvin's family and their children—mostly their oldest daughter—and include characters from L'Engle's "Chronos" series about the Austin family. In general, this series tends to be more reality-based and darker than the original quartet, including sexual themes. An Acceptable Time has been included with the original series in box sets in recent years due to its connections with time travel, tessering, and Meg's parents, but is still relatively unknown.
• Genius Bonus: Camazotz is also the name of a particularly terrifying Mayan bat god. Ixchel, the planet of the angelic, sightless Beasts, is named, appropriately enough, for a Mayan jaguar god of medicine and rainbows.
• Hard-to-Adapt Work: Despite being a popular children's book, for the longest time A Wrinkle In Time was considered "unfilmable" because of the fantastic elements and philosophy in what is ostensibly a children's story. Two attempts to adapt the work to live-action have been made, one a TV movie in 2003 and the other a theatrical release in 2018, but neither were successful with either the book's fanbase or general audiences.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Most modern readers will wonder if working with the Tesseract makes Meg's father Dr. Erik Selvig or Loki.
  • Meg's father calls her Megatron.
    • Even funnier is that a certain cartoon made a joke about a father naming his daughter Megatron.
• Older Than They Think: This book didn't actually invent the line "It was a dark and stormy night"; it first appeared in the 1830 novel Paul Clifford and was already a popular cliche.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • After so much time has been dedicated to IT and the Black Thing, the book ends without even trying to resolve all of the loose plot threads related to them, nor are they ever dealt with. This is intentional, since these are big cosmic problems and Meg, as an individual in a macrocosmic universe, is neither able nor expected to handle them herself, but rather do the best she can for the people she loves. But it can also feel like L'Engle just forgot about them the second she has Meg and her family return home from saving Charles Wallace.
  • Tessering in general is a fantastic premise for an entire series of science fiction novels about adventures in space and time, as fans of classic British television can attest. But Madeline L'Engle didn't have much interest in doing the same thing over again, so no later novels in the series reuse it and Dr. Murray never so much as mentions it again, despite seemingly having no real restrictions on his ability besides inexperience and trouble aiming. Though admittedly his extremely traumatic first experience could easily have put him off it, nothing is mentioned of his attempting to, say, refine and add safeties to the process.
• Uncertain Audience: The book is most famous as a children's book for elementary school students, but the scientific concepts are more suitable for middle-school or high-school students. This is particularly true for the other books in the series, which incorporate cellular-level biology concepts (A Wind in the Door) and theoretical physics (A Swiftly Tilting Planet).

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