A Wrinkle In Time

----My next book is A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle. I chose this book mostly because I'm looking for something easy to read after Kim. The pages go quickly in this book, which is a fantasy/science fiction Newbery Award winner.
----So far, everything's going pretty well. The main character is a girl named Meg Murray, who is about a freshman. She's a series of paradoxes really: failing every class including math, but brilliant with numbers, thinks she's a wimp but gets into fights, and she loves her family but considers herself unwanted. Meg is one of those characters to whom I say "suck it up, get a life, and move on." I seem to encounter these people very often.
----Meg's little brother, Charles Wallace, is five years old, hasn't started kindergarten, can't read, but uses words like "inadvertantly" in normal conversation. He's very calm and still, his dialogue is ridiculously intelligent, and you could read the whole book thinking he was an eighty-year-old monk. Also, he's a little unnerving because he can sort of read minds. It seems like he gets emotional readings and fragmented images from your mind, then strings the story together. Altogether, a darling but creepy little brother.
----Meg has two other brothers, Sandy and Dennis, who are twins. They play lots of sports, make B's in school, and seem to be the most normal of the children. Although they are only ten, they seem to have taken on the "man of the house" role, due to their father's absence.
----Ah, their father. Mr. Murry has been gone for a while-I want to say three years, but can't find the page to confirm it. According to Meg, he worked for the government on a Top Secret mission and had to travel a lot. He used to write to the family every day until suddenly, the letters stopped coming. Despite Mrs. Murry's best efforts, the government refuses to reveal his condition or location, only saying "you can be proud of him."
----Mrs. Murry, the mother, is amazingly beautiful, kind, and charismatic. She dwarfs Meg and would be quite the society lady if she acknowledged her husband's absence. Apparently everyone in the small town thinks the dad is either dead or off with another woman. She, Meg and the rest of the family, however, refuse to believe this.
----That's the Murry family portrait. The people on my mind are Charles Wallace, because he's creepy, mysterious and cute, and Mrs. Murry, because she believes in her husband even though she's normally so practical.