Book: A Wrinkle In Time
Author: Madeline L’Engle
Lesson: Religious references really stick out.
A friend of mine got me A Wrinkle In Time years ago for my birthday, along with the rest of the series.1 The story of how a girl, her brother and her neighbor meet three strange women and go off to save her father is a bit of a strange one, including talk of math and diagrams to make the explanations a little easier.
While the book was all right overall, but there was one thing that stuck out when I was reading it. They reference Jesus and God, which struck me as odd in a book that seemed to be about math on some level. Considering I tend to find science and religion to be at odds for the most part, the references stood out like they were written in blood on the page.
I couldn’t understand why aliens were singing about God, for one thing. I’m pretty sure aliens don’t really factor into Christianity, so I’m not sure what they were doing at all. Also, saying that both Jesus and Buddha were special disciples was… confusing.
If a character is religious, fine. If the world is based in Christianity, fine. Just don’t mix a Christian world with hard science fiction. They just seem to be directly in conflict with one another, regardless of whether or not it actually is. It all just stuck out oddly after reading it and it threw me out of the story.
- Yes, it’s a whole series. There’s four books all together, and they talk about the whole family. [↩]