【Cute Devil】

The Cute Devilfirst time I read A Wrinkle In Timeas a kid, I remember being utterly terrified.

Beginning with the iconic opening line "It was a dark and stormy night," Madeleine L'Engle's classic children's sci-fi tale takes us on a harrowing journey with iron-willed Meg Wallace, precocious Charles Wallace, and charming Calvin as they they bend time and space to find Meg and Charles's missing father.

SEE ALSO: 'A Wrinkle in Time' is for all the girls who feel like they're too much for this world

It wasn't until I re-read the book as an adult that I figured out why: As a kid, I was used to stories about kids persevering and fighting the challenges to discover the moral of being themselves. I wasn'tused to reading stories where the youthful protagonists face such grave mortal and existential peril.

And that's exactly what the children in A Wrinkle In Timeface. For instance, when tessering through the darkness, L'Engle writes:

"Without warning, coming as a complete and unexpected shock, she felt a pressure she had never imaged, as thogh she were being completely flattened out by an enormous steam roller. This was far worse than the nothingness had been; while she was nothing, there was no need to breathe, but now her lungs were squeezed together so that although she was dying for want of air there was no way for her lungs to expand and contract, to take in the air that she must have to stay alive."

It's a different type of anguish than what we're used to seeing in children's books, where the danger usually comes from a big bad enemy rather than something as commonplace as getting from point A to point B.

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And that's only one of many realizations you come to when you re-read A Wrinkle In Timeas an adult.

This week on the MashReads Podcast, we read and discuss A Wrinkle In Time. Join us as we talk about reading the book as an adult, the not-so-hidden religious connotations in the book, and the larger than life characters we meet in the journey.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Then, inspired by A Wrinkle In Time, which was recently made into an Ava DuVernay movie, we talk about what other books we want to see be made into films, including Ghana Must Goby Taiye Selasi, Lincoln In The Bardoby George Saunders, and Grief Is The Thing With Feathersby Max Porter.

And as always, we close the show with recommendations:

• Peter recommends Mark Duplass' horror movie Creep 2."The Creep movies are awesome. These are just the tiniest horror movies that are so small and so subtle." Also, Peter went camping recently and recommends stepping away from the news cycle for a bit as a refresher. You can read about his experience in his story "I didn't hear the word 'Trump' for 4 days, and I very much recommend it."

• Martha recommends Twitter user Carrington Harrison's fan-made March Maddness Bracket but for Kanye West songs. "It is so fun to do. I am a huge Kanye West fan and it's such a fun trip down memory lane. It's very hard to put these songs that mean so much to me against each other." (Piggybacking off of that, MJ shouts out Chance The Rapper's verse on 'Ultra-Light Beam' when Kanye West performed the song for SNL.)

• MJ recommends Carla Bruce-Eddings' article 'Love, Simon' and the "Surprise of Parental Support for Queer Children." "I want to recommend it for two reasons. 1) The article is phenomenal. 2) Carla is great. She's a publicist at Riverhead, she's a books editor at Well Read Black Girl, go support her, go support this article because it's really thoughtful. He also shouts out Emily X.R. Pan's novel The Astonish Color of After. "This book is truly incredible."

Next week, we're reading and discussing Ken Lui's short story 'Paper Menagerie.' We hope you'll join us. You can read it online here.

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Featured Video For You

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Oprah, Reese Witherspoon, and Mindy Kaling shine in new clips from 'A Wrinkle In Time'

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