_A Wrinkle In Time_ was the first sci-fi I ever read. I was maybe 6 or 7. That hooked me then! Thanks for the notice.
George --- In scifinoir2@yahoogroups.com, "Brent Wodehouse" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/08/books/07cnd-lengle.html > Madeleine L'Engle, Children's Writer, Is Dead > By DOUGLAS MARTIN > Published: September 8, 2007 > > Madeleine L'Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including > childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved > emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died > Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88. > > Her death, of natural causes, was announced today by her publisher, > Farrar, Straus and Giroux. > > Ms. L'Engle (pronounced LENG-el) was best known for her children's > classic, "A Wrinkle in Time," which won the John Newbery Award as > the best children's book of 1963. By 2004, it had sold more than 6 > million copies, was in its 67th printing and was still selling > 15,000 copies a year. > > Her works poetry, plays, autobiography and books on prayer were > deeply, quixotically personal. But it was in her vivid children's > characters that readers most clearly glimpsed her passionate search > for the questions that mattered most. She sometimes spoke of her > writing as if she were taking dictation from her subconscious. > > "Of course I'm Meg," Ms. L'Engle said about the beloved protagonist > of "A Wrinkle in Time." > > The "St. James Guide to Children's Writers" called Ms. L'Engle "one > of the truly important writers of juvenile fiction in recent > decades." Such accolades did not come from pulling > punches: "Wrinkle" is one of the most banned books because of its > treatment of the deity. > > "It was a dark and stormy night," it begins, repeating the line of > a 19th-century novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, and presaging > the immortal sentence that Snoopy, the inspiration-challenged > beagle of the Peanuts cartoon, would type again and again. After > the opening, "Wrinkle," quite literally, takes off. Meg Murray, > with help from her psychic baby brother, uses time travel and > extrasensory perception to rescue her father, a gifted scientist, > from a planet controlled by the Dark Thing. She does so through the > power of love. <snip>