I think I read A Wrinkle in Time in sixth grade. Maybe seventh. Although I have forgotten many of the details of that book, I have never forgotten the powerful effect it had on me. So when I heard that its author, Madeleine L'Engle, 88, had died on Thursday, September 6, I had a moment of grateful reflection.

Wrinkle is the story of 12-year-old Meg Murry, a girl who thinks she's stupid--but who, of course, is anything but. She, her strange little brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin embark on a dangerous journey across the universe to try to find Meg's missing father. The children travel across time and space, through folds in the space-time continuum called tesseracts. Along the way, they are shadowed by an evil force called the Dark Thing.

L'Engle introduced me to concepts of physics that stretched my young mind in new ways. If I'd thought I understood the nature of reality at that point in my life, I suddenly realized that the universe is a far more mysterious and complex thing than I could possibly imagine or understand. The battles of good and evil that permeate and define the novel also made me think in ways that went beyond the black-and-white catechism view of the world that I had held up until then. And yet, at the same time, the book reinforced that view, with the compelling truth that love alone can conquer evil--that love is the ultimate salvation.

In short, A Wrinkle In Time was the first book that really made me think. And what a wonderfully shivery feeling it gave me to ponder such thoughts! It was like jumping into dark but inviting waters of infinite depth. The sense of weightlessness it gave my mind was a new form of freedom, never before experienced. And I wanted more.

Though L'Engle wrote many books, poems, and plays, A Wrinkle in Time was her masterpiece. It was rejected by 26 publishers before Farrar, Straus & Giroux accepted it in 1962. The novel went on to win the prestigious John Newbery Medal as the best children’s book of 1963, and still holds its own today.

Part science-fiction adventure, part coming-of-age story, part religious allegory, A Wrinkle in Time expressed L'Engle’s "faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically."

Madeleine L'Engle, you changed my life. Thanks.

PS: Because A Wrinkle in Time was and is a frequently banned book, Madeleine L'Engle's official web site, madeleinelengle.com, suggests we honor the author's memory by reading a banned book.