Teleportation

In my enthusiasm to develop a love of books in my daughter when she was born in 2008, I started to buy all those titles I had read and loved back in my childhood. As I didn't start reading until at least age seven, I never read those early classics like Good Night Moon or The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Instead, I was buying books my daughter will not likely start to enjoy for at least another five years or so. So I re-read them as soon as they arrived from Amazon.com and am still amazed at the talent of those great writers of young fiction.



One of my first purchases was A Wrinkle in Time. Re-reading it brought me back to those wonderful years in Mrs. Taylor's class. Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, the top student from each primary school in our district would be excused from regular class to attend a special class that used an interdisciplinary approach to teaching. We worked on one class project per term (e.g. "Build a City of the Future"); by having to create models and write reports describing our city (form of government, city planning, transportation, family home), we were taught math, history, science and anthropology in that context.

In my future city, residents teleported. I must have been reading A Wrinkle in Time and taken the idea from the book. From there on, I went through a phase of reading science fiction and fantasy; one that sticks in my memory is a story by Isaac Asimov about a child who is locked in a closet by classmates on the one day every seven years that it stops raining and the sun comes out. I have not read any more science fiction since my teens, but my interest in the genre never fully left me: in my 20s I became a devoted fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation TV series (they teleport too!).



Last month, I bought When You Reach Me, a recently published young fiction book. I read it because a book review said it was inspired by A Wrinkle in Time. I loved the story and the writing, and it brought me back to my egocentric childhood where I identified with Meg and her brother because I believed I was more intellectual and perceptive and sensitive than other children around me (surely I don't believe that anymore!).