Intergalactic P.S. 3, by Madeleine L'Engle

When I heard there was a new book published in the Wrinkle In Time series, I was thrilled.  But then I discovered that Intergalactic P.S. 3 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Feb. 2018, 112 pages) was just the starter point for what would become the second book in the series, A Wind in the Door.  L'Engle published it for Children's Book Week in 1970, and it's more a long short story than a full book.  L'Engle tells, in Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, that she struggled with the plot of A Wind in the Door, with the characters coming clear to her mind but the story being more troublesome.  Intergalactic P.S. 3 was an early stab at the story, and so it doesn't fill in an actual gap in the series, but simply is an alternate version of what "really" happened.

Charles Wallace is about to start school, and he and his family are convinced it is going to be a disaster, because the stereotypical small town mentality where they live is going to make it impossible for a little genius like C.W. to survive without getting beaten up.  The conversation is a lot more direct than it is in a Wind in the Door, and I couldn't help but feel that his parents were setting C.W. up for failure without actually doing anything useful, like trying to talk to his teachers, or possibly moving so he could have a fresh start without negative preconceptions shadowing him.  Meg is determined to save her brother from the hell of public school kindergarten, and so with the power of will and wishing she summons the three Mrs. W, who whisk C.W., Meg, and Calvin off to school on another planet.  

There they are each paired with an alien child, and although Calvin's dolphin-headed partner didn't make it into the final version (no great loss), Progo the cherubim and Sporos, not yet a mitochondrian, are paired with the others, and Meg has to undergo her "which is the real Mr. Jenkins" test.

When I read a Wind in the Door at the age of nine, the Mr. Jenkins test blew my mind.  The story of Calvin's shoes, especially the pathos of Mr. Jenkins trying to make the new ones look a bit used, so as to spare Calvin's feelings, had a huge impact on me (and maybe even made me a better person....at any rate I spent considerable waiting to fall asleep time trying to love the principal of my own school, with little success but perhaps it was good for me).  So reading a much-less developed version of the story did nothing for me.

Basically this book isn't a thrilling expansion of the known universe of A Wrinkle In Time, but simply a look at how the final story of A Wind in the Door developed.  Not without interest to fans, but not exactly a treat.  If, on the other hand, there are young kids today who want to read "the next book" but are not ready to independently read A Wind in the Door, this would be just fine--it's a lot shorter and easier to read, and has friendly illustrations by Hope Larson (who did the graphic novel version of Wrinkle).

What I'm really left with is the desire to re-read Wind in the Door, and a horrible feeling that I don't know where I shelved it...and the old feeling of "those eyes are really scary."
(this isn't my copy, but mine is the same edition in about the same state...I re-read it a lot.)