A Wrinkle in Time premieres
Madeleine’s granddaughters Charlotte Jones Voiklis and Léna Roy share their reactions to seeing the movie adaptation for the first time.
It happened. Earlier this week we were part of the celebration in Hollywood for the premiere of Ava Duvernay’s interpretation of our grandmother’s beloved classic, A Wrinkle in Time.
We won’t leak any spoilers here, but want you to know that it’s a visually stunning film that amplifies the book’s messages of hope. It’s invigorating and inspiring, just what we’d hoped for. We love how the inclusive and diverse casting deepens and extends the vision and story of an underestimated and seemingly powerless young girl who learns that she and everyone of us have the tools and capacity to overcome the darkness. We love that a powerful storyteller such as Ava DuVernay saw something in the book that she wanted to bring to life in a different medium. We love that so many people are reading the book and anticipating the movie with such eagerness.
The book asks us to imagine a world where we all matter; where we are part of a great cosmic endeavor of balancing dark and light; where the least among us can make a difference; where each one of us awakens to our own capacity to resist the darkness, in our individual hearts and minds as well as in the greater universe. Ava DuVernay’s film exemplifies this theme by showing us that heroes are beautiful and come in all different shapes, sizes and colors.
Many of you want to know what our grandmother would think of the movie: she felt it was a great honor for one artist’s work to inspire another. She knew that different mediums required different techniques in order for works to come to life in different ways. And she knew that her book would always still be the book.
We hope that you go see the movie, that it will make you fall in love with the book all over again, and that it will inspire you to fight the darkness.
With love,
Charlotte and Léna
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Charlotte Jones Voiklis is Madeleine L’Engle’s granddaughter and executor of her estate. She is a lead producer of the musical adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time. She is also the co-author with Jennifer Adams of A Book, Too, Can Be a Star (October 2022), a picture book biography illustrated by Adelina Lirius; and, with her sister, Léna Roy, of Becoming Madeleine (2018), a biography for middle grade readers.
She wrote the afterword to the 50th Anniversary edition of A Wrinkle in Time, and the introduction to The Moment of Tenderness (2020), a collection of short stories. Charlotte has also written and spoken extensively about her grandmother’s work to a variety of audiences.
With a PhD in Comparative Literature, Charlotte’s professional experience spans teaching, fundraising, communications, and grant making. She has also volunteered as a mediator in the New York City court system, and coached police officers on mediation skills. Charlotte lives in New York and Connecticut with her husband and has two grown children.