At the risk of being mauled by the fierce defenders of this book...I didn't really like this. I wanted to. I don't read books I don't think I'm going to like, and the fact that this is considered a children's classic and I hadn't already read it felt like something that needed to be amended.

I decided to listen to this on audiobook yesterday so I could also do some housework. First of all, Hope Davis does a phenomenal job with this audiobook. She gives each of the characters distinct voices, and I never had trouble figuring out who was speaking in a given scene. If I was just rating the audiobook for its quality in production and voice acting, I'd give it a 4 or 5. If you do want to pick this book up, I highly recommend the audiobook.

That being said, the audiobook also highlights some of the issues I had with this book, specifically the writing and dialogue. There is a lot of repetition in this book of words and phrases that are vague. It, evil, thing, darkness, dark thing, etc. were repeated ad nauseum with little description to accompany them. There's a scene at the end

where Meg just repeats to her brother variations of 'I love you' for several minutes that reminded me of the scene in Singin' in the Rain where Gene Kelly's character makes up his own dialogue and just repeats, "I love you, I love you, I LOVE YOU!" over and over again and is ridiculed for it. This was just as cringy.

It's also true that by the end of this very short book I was just ready for it to end, so my patience was close to zero with the soft, vague language.

It's too bad, because I enjoyed the beginning of the book well enough. I was interested in what was going on with these characters, and liked the idea of them going off to find their father. But I didn't end up liking the characters. Charles Wallace, who apparently is everyone's fave, is annoying and it feels like he's just there as a contrivance to keep what little plot there actually is in this book moving along. The other characters also lacked depth and I had a difficult time connecting with any of them or caring about their journey.

As other critical reviews have stated, there are some pretty blatant anti-Communist rhetoric shoved into this book, which I suppose isn't surprising considering the time in which this book was written, but I feel like it didn't need to be so obvious. It felt like she wanted to hit the reader over the head with the message that Communism=bad. We get it, okay. We get it.

I won't be continuing with the series.