It was a dark and stormy night.
Out of this wild night, a strange visitor comes to the Murry house and beckons Meg, her brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O’Keefe on a most dangerous and extraordinary adventure — one that will threaten their lives and our universe.
All the characters are flat — the genius child, the misfit girl, the beautiful, genius, scientist mother who nonetheless stays home and cooks stew in bunsen burners while her husband has adventures. And then there are three beings who used to be stars before they died in the fight with the “Darkness” and became something beyond our comprehension. Essentially they are a Deus Ex Machina, a convenient plot device for transporting the characters throughout the Universe and the story.
The story takes about 100 pages of tedious, banal dialogue, to get to the point where you are told that this is a battle against Evil, and all you need is love. But everything is so oversimplified, so sketchy — everything is reduced to big words, like IT, and evil. This IT, also called the Dark Thing, is striving to create a communist-type society where everyone conforms, down to the little children who bounce their balls in uniform rhythms and who live in cutter-box houses.
And the so-called Darkness, Evil, IT… is essentially a disembodied brain, and the main character defeats this brain by gushing love. There were undertones of spiritual / religious indoctrination throughout the book. On the whole, it was a tedious, patronizing and superficial story which was attempting to pass off in equal parts as science fiction, fantasy and family fiction.
There were so many reviews praising this book to high heavens. I was thoroughly disappointed.