I hadn’t touched this since I was maybe eleven, and I picked it back up mostly out of nostalgia, expecting the tesseract stuff to feel thin now that I know what a dimension actually is in any technical sense. It didn’t. L’Engle’s explanation, the ant on the string, walking across a folded piece of fabric instead of the long way round, is still one of the cleanest ways I’ve seen anyone explain a hard physics concept to a kid without dumbing it down into nonsense.

What surprised me on the reread is how much of the book is actually about Meg being bad at things in a way the plot doesn’t fix, she stays stubborn and quick to anger through the whole book, that’s not a flaw she overcomes so much as the exact trait that saves Charles Wallace at the end, when love, her specific and imperfect and furious love for her brother, is the thing IT can’t process or absorb. That’s a genuinely unusual structure for a kids’ book from 1962, most stories like this resolve the protagonist’s flaw, this one just says the flaw was the point the whole time.

Camazotz is still the best part, the identical houses, the children bouncing balls in perfect unison, one kid slightly out of rhythm and getting hauled inside for correction, that image has stuck with me for two decades and lost none of its unease now that I’m the age to actually clock what a totalitarian metaphor looks like. The Mrs. W’s are a little more twee than I remembered, and Calvin still feels underwritten next to Meg and Charles Wallace, but neither of those things cost it much. Some books you loved as a kid don’t survive contact with an adult brain. This one just showed me a different book than I remembered reading.