Once those children actually existed, they made it quite clear that this planning was for naught. I didn’t have that bonus you-will-read-this power, it turned out—at least not for long. Given the choice (and they were given the choice), they wanted to decide on the books themselves, as I should have well known. They wanted to hear godawful Biscuit books instead of Make Way for Ducklings. They thought Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was boring. They didn’t like homey animal stories or books about trees. They weren’t as beguiled as I was by the prospect of unlimited black-and-white blueberries.
The ability to choose one’s own books becomes slightly less satisfying when you realize your own children have that power, too, and they insist on reading about rainbow fairies or killer cats. You can momishly lead a child in certain directions—point him to particular shelves at the library, refuse to buy certain books, discuss treasured authors in favorable terms and hope he doesn’t hear about the others. But those techniques take you only so far. I was shocked when, after handing my ten-year-old daughter a fiftieth-anniversary boxed set of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time quintet (still but a wee trilogy in my youth), she stopped after the first book. “Don’t you want to continue to A Wind in the Door?” I asked, scandalized.
For girls who came of age anytime during the past half century, reading L’Engle’s Newbery Medal–winning classic was pivotal. The main character, Meg Murry, offered a real departure from the typical “girls’ book” protagonist—as wonderful as many of those varied characters are. Here was an awkward child whose flyaway hair, braces, and glasses existed alongside a fierce intelligence and determination, which she uses to save her father, and ultimately the universe. She reaches girls just as they are actively seeking to define themselves, their own ambitions, and their place in the world, and shows them a way that has nothing to do with looks or popularity or submission.
I had bestowed upon my daughter a sacred nugget of maternal wisdom, and she had cast it aside.
In 1962, when A Wrinkle in Time was acquired by the publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux after it had been rejected twenty-six times, science fiction aimed at girls was a rarity. The stuff of pulp and comics for errant schoolboys, sci-fi was not considered up to the standards of children’s literature. Even today, girls and grown women are not often fans. Half of eighteen-to twenty-four-year-old men say science fiction is their favorite kind of book, compared with only a fourth of young women. And while a sizable portion of young men continue to read science fiction into later adulthood, women generally don’t.
A Wrinkle in Time defied the norm by inviting girls in and valuing them. The story follows three children as they cross the barriers of time and space through something called a tesseract. On a “dark and stormy night,” Mrs Whatsit (whose honorific appeared mysteriously without periods), a celestial being disguised as an old woman, visits Meg; her mother, a microbiologist who later wins the Nobel Prize; and her younger brother, Charles Wallace. Soon Meg and Charles Wallace, a prodigy of sorts—today he might be considered on the spectrum—and Calvin O’Keefe, a high school boy, are tesseracting across the universe in search of Meg’s father.
Meg can perform square-root functions in her head, a mark not of wallflower status but of moral distinction. Still, she harbors doubts about her intellectual abilities, and her exacting expectations rub off on the reader. Yet it’s Meg, a girl who combines both the ordinary and the extraordinary, who overcomes the book’s villain—an evil disembodied brain called IT—with the power of a simple human emotion. At its core, A Wrinkle in Time is about love, a girl’s love for her parents, and her ability to marshal her strengths to rescue and honor them. I desperately wanted Beatrice to see herself in that book and to love it.
She did not. If part of the inevitable maturation of the parent is to realize how different one’s children are from oneself, a corollary is realizing one’s children may not appreciate the same books either. As my kids got older, the evening’s read-aloud time shifted to parallel reading. They read their books, and I read mine. I laugh now that I could have ever imagined otherwise.
Like Beatrice, I’ve always jealously guarded my freedom to choose my own books; I’ve never wanted to have to read a book, whether for work or for play. This is why, throughout my twenties and well into my thirties, I resisted joining a book club, despite longing for a community of readers. What if they chose the wrong book or stole me away from mine?
Then I discovered Kidlit, a children’s book club, or, more precisely, a book club for adults exclusively devoted to children’s literature. The books were easy to read, and they were short. They were also, during this period, central to my life, given my three young children. The members of Kidlit, not all of whom even had children, firmly believed children’s books should be central throughout your life. Now this might work.
I got involved in Kidlit through my friend Gretchen, whom I met in that layered almost conspiratorial way that often happens in New York, via several channels simultaneously. First, I spotted her at an evening salon for women, in which prominent writers were invited to speak to a small group every month or so. Gretchen seemed to know everyone there. Later, I realized she was a fellow mother at Beatrice’s summer camp. There, too, she knew everyone. Finally, we were introduced at a party, and the various intersections coalesced into friendship.
It turned out Gretchen also knew everyone who loved Kidlit. She and her friend Jen, a literary agent, had started the book club when they realized that as adults they both needed to talk about Harry Potter. Not only did they like reading Potter, they liked reading all children’s books, whether written for starry-eyed eight-year-olds or sullen eighteen-year-olds. And they weren’t alone. By the time I joined the group, the group had over a dozen members and had spawned an offshoot. (There are now three branches.) Every six weeks, we would gather over dinner to discuss a children’s book, rotating among classic (Little House on the Prairie), modern (Island of the Blue Dolphins), and contemporary (The Fault in Our Stars) literature.
Kidlit offered something I’d never had before outside of Paris—a place to get together regularly with fellow readers (most of them far better read than I) to discuss books I cared passionately about, without call for embarrassment or excuse. Even when the books were intended for children. Here were my people! Nobody judged anyone else, even as our opinions on particular titles wildly diverged. We argued over whether Katniss was a tool of the state, and whether The Hunger Games was a conventional romance or a subversion of the genre.