Madeleine L'Engle died yesterday in Connecticut. She was 88 years old. Madeleine L'Engle's books were some of my favorites in childhood. Her books weave stories that include science, but never make you feel as if you're being taught something. A Wrinkle In Time is based in part on Einstein's ideas about space and time. In A Wind in the Door, Meg travels her brother's mitochondria (the tiny powerhouses of the cells) to cure him of a mysterious disease. Limb regeneration plays a major part in The Arm of the Starfish.

The books were wildly successful, and they certainly resonated with me - to live in a big old house like Meg's, with lots of siblings and brilliant scientist parents, eating dinners cooked on bunsen burners, was my romantic ideal of childhood. Now cooking on bunsen burners just seems like a bad idea - lab chemicals and food preparation belong in separate rooms. But the interest in unknown worlds sparked by the books lived on, for me and many other readers. I still reread A Wind in the Door every few years - maybe now it's time to pick it up again.

— Helen Fields

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