Just Finished Reading Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door

A Wind in the Door, by Madeleine L'Engle, and which I just finished reading a few days ago,  is the second book in her TIme Quintet science fiction series aimed at young adults and teens.  Like its predecessor, A Wrinkle in Time, the Murray children of Meg and Charles Wallace, along with their friend Calvin O'Keefe, are involved in another adventure to save the world from evil forces threatening it.  But unlike the first book in this series,  the focus here is on microbiology, with the Murray kids' mother, a microbiologist, being the science expert instead of their father, a physicist and whose adventures were featured in the previous story, which involved planet-hopping through a device called the "tesseract".

The crisis in A Wind in the Door focuses on the human mitochondria, found in each cell and which are indispensable to life.  A disease that infects them has spread among the population, and young Charles Wallace catches it, his life in peril.  In the meantime, Meg has discovered that her hated former school principal, Mr. Jenkins, has tripled in number, all three identical on the surface.  But two of the Mr. Jenkins are Echthroi, which go about destroying things by "un-naming" and emptying them (also called "X"-ing). Meg is tasked with the problem of naming which of the three is the real Mr. Jenkins, and she discovers that love for this thoroughly unlikable person is the key in accomplishing this.  Then, with the help of a dragon-like cherubim, the real Mr. Jenkins, and a visiting human-like Mr. Blajeny to teach them, Meg and Calvin (along with the cherubim and Jenkins) shrink way down in scale, recalling to me the movie Fantastic Voyage (but much, much smaller), and enter the mitochondria of Charles Wallace to determine what is causing the sickness.  There they encounter a rebellion of young "farandolae" (one of them, named "Sporos", is also a pupil of Blajeny), which according to the author's imagination are in symbiosis with the mitochondria and are needed for their healthy function.  And who is stirring up the trouble among these mouse-like creatures?  None other than those troublesome Echthroi...and it's up to Meg to quell the rebellion, defeat the Echthroi, and save the life of her little brother...

There's a lot of science in A Wind in the Door...much of it speculative.  I can see how Madeleine L'Engle's stories can spur young readers to take a greater interest in areas like biology, physics, and astronomy.  But the main emphasis is more about ethics and philosophy...and how love is the driving force in life and creation...