More than half a century since it was published, “A Wrinkle in Time,” the classic children’s book by Madeleine L’Engle, is finally hitting the big screen on Friday. If you’d like to immerse yourself further into L’Engle’s world, here are three recommendations: her biography, the original story and a third book with a wholly different magical world that also places women at its center.

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A WRINKLE IN TIME

By Madeleine L’Engle

216 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. (1962)

It is worth revisiting the classic story of Meg Murry, a young, bright girl who travels across the universe to find her missing scientist father. She is accompanied by her younger brother, Charles Wallace, and a high school boy, Calvin O’Keefe. Together, they traverse the universe via a tesseract, which is “a way to travel through time and space using a fifth dimension,” and along the way, they encounter celestial beings named Mrs Who, Mrs Which and Mrs Whatsit, who help them on their journey. In an essay, Pamela Paul, the editor of The Times Book Review, wrote that Meg “was a departure from the typical ‘girls’ book’ protagonist,” and that though she suffered through “flyaway hair, braces and glasses,” she was “to a much greater degree concerned with the extent of her own intelligence, the whereabouts of her missing scientist father, the looming threat of conformity and, ultimately, the fate of the universe.”

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LISTENING FOR MADELEINE

A Portrait of Madeleine L’Engle in Many Voices

By Leonard S. Marcus

363 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. (2012)