The most ambitious of American SF stories for young people is Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time…. Heroine Meg Murry, who wears spectacles and has braces on her teeth, sets off with precocious small brother Charles and friend Calvin O'Keefe to rescue her scientist father from the grip of IT; a great brain that controls the lives of the zombie population of a planet called Camazotz. The power of love and the help of three witches who appear also to be angels enable Meg to triumph over evil (evil being the extermination of individuality). There is a luminous confusion about A Wrinkle in Time; it seems to be trying to do too many things at once. But it is an attractive book, splendidly unafraid of being clever or out-of-the-or-dinary, and not concerned to reinforce the image of the regular guy or girl. (p. 215)

John Rowe Townsend, in his...