Readers of A Wrinkle in Time are given many clues that these three characters are anything but ordinary. Let us look at the details about each character in order to show how they are definitely unusual.

Mrs. Whatsit appears on a dark and rainy night, dressed in a huge amount of varied clothing that makes her look like a homeless witch. We learn later that this was her attempt to assimilate into the human culture on Earth, where she vastly misinterpreted clothing styles. She is strange and funny and captivating, especially when she mentions the idea of a tesseract. The tesseract is what Meg's father was investigating when he disappeared.

Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which are also unusual. Mrs. Who is an enigma because she only speaks in quotations (often from the Bible). Again, this is the strange way that Mrs. Who tries to assimilate and, we later learn, to help the children on their quest. Mrs. Which is the strangest of them all, always ethereal and appearing in a kind of shimmer. Her words are almost not understandable. L'Engle writes Mrs. Which's words with many double letters to show they are not spoken normally.

Luckily, these three "abnormal" ladies serve as the children's guides through space and time as they try to defeat darkness, evil, and hatred while retrieving Meg's father from the clutches of IT.