Adults Can Find Great Reads in the Children's Section of the Bookstore

Madeleine L'Engle is dead.

I saw the headline in the online edition of the New York Times and a wave of nostalgia washed over me. Meg Murray, the protagonist in L'Engle's classic, Newberry Award winning series, is one of my favorite literary characters from childhood. I wanted to be her. I probably was her: nerdy, intelligent, sarcastic, a diamond (or at least a white topaz) beneath the rough adolescent exterior of too-thick glasses and a mother who didn't pay attention to children's fashion.

When my son was old enough to read A Wrinkle in Time, I handed him the tattered, oversized paperback I had read so many times myself. He looked at it with a sneer. I sighed. It really was falling apart. I had actually taped a few pages back into it as I reread it before deciding that, yes, it was time for him to learn about fewmets and tesseracts.

Barnes and Noble carried the entire series in hardcover. I bought them. Besides looking really swell on the shelf in their matching dust jackets, I knew that these books would never get outdated. My son's children will read them, and maybe his grandchildren. Their grandmother- and great-grandmother-to-be has read them again as an adult and finds no reason not to keep them on the shelf. These are not the kind of children's books that are outgrown and packed away for a future generation. Like our hardcover Narnia books in their cardboard display box, Madeleine L'Engle's books are meant to be seen and read regardless of my age or Jack's.

There are a lot of children's books that are really, really good even for adults. It seems that the "phenomenon" of Harry Potter surprised some of my adult friends, as well as adults all over the world. Books written for and about adolescents don't have to be sophomoric. Those that aren't, that are well written and tell a good story, have universal appeal even if they are sold from the children's section of the bookstore.