When I told Jean that the library’s fifth grade book group was going to be discussing Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, she mentioned that she vividly remembered the scene with the little boy bouncing a ball.  Since we couldn’t locate the scene in the book at that moment, I made sure to mark it as I read the book for book group.  There are actually two scenes that Jean might be remembering, so I thought I’d quote them below (both are quoted from the Farrar, Straus and Giroux reprint of the 1962 Crosswicks edition):

Below them the town was laid out in harsh angular patterns.  The houses in the outskirts were all exactly alike, small square boxes painted gray.  Each had a small, rectangular plot of lawn in front, with a straight line of dull-looking flowers edging the path to the door.  Meg had a feeling that if she could count the flowers there would be exactly the same number for each house.  In front of all the houses children were playing.  Some were skipping rope, some were bouncing balls.  Meg felt vaguely that something was wrong with their play.  It seemed exactly like children playing around any housing development at home, and yet there was something different about it.  She looked at Calvin, and saw that he, too, was puzzled.

“Look!” Charles Wallace said suddenly.  “They’re skipping and bouncing in rhythm!  Everyone’s doing it at exactly the same moment.”

This was so.  As the skipping rope hit the pavement, so did the ball.  As the rope curved over the head of the jumping child, the child with the ball caught the ball.  Down came the ropes.  Down came the balls.  Over and over again.  Up.  Down.  All in rhythm.  All identical.  Like the houses.  Like the paths.  Like the flowers.  (pp. 98- 99)

 Second quote, from when Charles Wallace has fallen under the control of IT:

“Now see this,” he [Charles Wallace] said.  He raised his hand and suddenly they could see through one of the walls into a small room.  In the room a little boy was bouncing a ball.  He was bouncing it in rhythm, and the walls of his little cell seemed to pulse with the rhythm of the ball.  And each time the ball bounced he screamed as though he were in pain. 

“That’s the little boy we saw this afternoon,” Calvin said sharply, “the little boy who wasn’t bouncing the ball like the others.”

Charles Wallace giggled again.  “Yes.  Every once in a while there’s a little trouble with cooperation, but it’s easily taken care of.  After today he’ll never desire to deviate again.”  (pp. 136 – 137)

A Wrinkle in Time is one of my all-time favorite books, but I hadn’t read it for a few years and had forgotten just how masterful it is.  And I was very gratified to find out that every child in the fifth grade book group loved it as much as I do; some have even read it multiple times.  We had a great conversation about the book, focusing primarily on the dark thing and what the dark thing means and does.  It was great to have such an in-depth discussion with this group of kids, where we zeroed in on one aspect of the book and studied it in detail. 

And, in rereading the book, I realized that a book I recently discussed on this blog, The Sky Inside, owes much to L’Engle’s novel (for instance, the quote above that describes the sameness of the houses and the children is very much reproduced in the concentric suburb of The Sky Inside), though the newer book doesn’t really even begin to compare with L’Engle’s masterpiece.