A companion to A Wrinkle in Time. With only 24 hours to prevent a Tragedy, can Charles Wallace, with the help of Meg, succeed?

Out of the books in this series, this has been my favorite yet. I think I enjoyed reading about Meg being married and just knowing where she is at in life. I think that the turn on events that occurs in this book are more relative to what is going on in the characters life this go around as well. I'm not sure if I would read this book in my class, but would strongly recommend it to my students, especially if we had read any of the books in the series. ( )

This story is a little like a puzzle, trying to fit all the different characters together. It is also a story about letting go of control, but being willing to act where you are placed. The other thing I enjoyed about this novel was the exploration of the power of words. Lastly, because Charles Wallace is traveling through time to find the places where things can be changed, the reader gets to enjoy a number of interrelated stories. ( )

In order to prevent a nuclear war, Charles Wallace teams up with a unicorn/Pegasus thing to (surprise) travel through time.

If you enjoyed the previous volumes, you'll probably enjoy this one as well. ( )

Summary: Charles Wallace Murry is now fifteen, although he's just as quiet and serious as he was when he was younger. On one fateful Thanksgiving night, Mr. Murry receives a call from the President, informing the family that Mad Dog Branzillo, the dictator of a small South American country, has threatened the world with nuclear war. With a charge laid on him by Mrs. O'Keefe, his sister's normally taciturn mother-in-law, to avert the disaster, he heads out to the starwatching rock, where he speaks the rune she taught him. The universe sends him help in the form of the unicorn Gaudior, who will take Charles Wallace back in time. In each time, he must go Within a host, seeking to find the Might-Have-Been, the one choice that can change the course of history, and forestall nuclear war.

Review: I don't go in for lists of lifetime favorites, because it's too hard to narrow down my lifetime of books into five, or ten, and to tell whether I love a book because of nostalgia, or on its own merits. Regardless, if someone was standing with a pair of scissors to my library card and forcing me to to pick my all-time favorite books, A Swiftly Tilting Planet would almost certainly be on the list. I can't count the number of times I read this book as a child, and I recently re-listened to it, and it turns out I love it just as much at twenty eight as I did at eight.

Okay, so, why do I love this book? First and foremost, I love how neatly, and how beautifully everything fits together. As Charles Wallace goes Within a different host in each period of history, the book almost reads like a collection of short stories - like Cloud Atlas, although much more intertwined. I love how tiny details, names, histories, places, and words of power reappear, slightly modified, in each time, and I love that the book is structured with each line of Patrick's Rune becoming a chapter title. It's a book concerned with genealogies, and the historical legacies of our choices, and while these concepts may be somewhat contrived and somewhat simplified (it is a kids' book, after all), the way L'Engle weaves together past and present is much more intricate and complex than it initially appears.

Much has been made of L'Engle's Christian slant to her writing, but I never noticed any such slant as a child, and even though I can kind of see it as an adult, it's not nearly so obvious as in C. S. Lewis's Narnia books. Most of her characters are Christians (although not "obviously" so), and words like God and Heaven are capitalized throughout, but when Charles Wallace calls on "all Heaven" for help, he's sent a flying, time-traveling unicorn. Christian values like love and self-sacrifice are emphasized, but I don't find it to be proselytizing in the slightest.

I think, at heart, what makes A Swiftly Tilting Planet my favorite out of the Kronos Quartet is that 1) it focuses on Charles Wallace, so there's much less of Meg's whining, which got old rather quickly in A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door; and 2) there is, in general, a lot less talking and a lot more doing, and the plot moves much more rapidly through a variety of scenes and stories, all of which interconnect to form one wonderful whole. 5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: While readers of Madeleine L'Engle's earlier books are going to be the most likely to pick this one up on the basis of name-recognition, I don't think either of the previous books are required to understand and enjoy A Swiftly Tilting Planet. It's also got a very different feel than her earlier books, so I really think everyone should give this childhood favorite a chance. ( )