A Wrinkle in Time
A tesseract, a dark force called IT, and Meg Murry's refusal to surrender her father or her brother. L'Engle brings genuinely Christian cosmology to SF without losing its wonder or her girl protagonist's ferocity. The first major SF/F by an American woman to win the Newbery.
Readers call the prose and dialogue clunky, several comparing L’Engle unfavourably to Lewis, the allegory “as obvious in its way as The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” The overt Christian material reads as a tonal left turn to anyone coming in cold, “unsettling religious undertones paired with explicit Christian promulgation” dropped into a science-fiction frame. The worlds the family visits are sketched in a few lines each. One reader comes away grumbling the characters “traveled all through the known Universe and have nothing to show for it.” The climactic confrontation resolves too quickly for the dread built getting there. And the conformity allegory reads to one reviewer as “Red Scare propaganda from the 1950’s” outright.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
