Many Waters

Madeleine L'Engle

1986 • 359 pages

Ratings68

Average rating4

Sandy and Dennys have always been the normal, run-of-the-mill ones in the extraodinary Murry family. They garden, make an occasional A in school, and play baseball. Nothing especially interesting has happened to the twins until they accidentally interrupt their father's experiment.

Then the two boys are thrown across time and space. They find themselves alone in the desert, where, if they believe in unicorns, they can find unicorns, and whether they believe or not, mammoths and manticores will find them.

The twins are rescued by Japheth, a man from the nearby oasis, but before he can bring them to safety, Dennys gets lost. Each boy is quickly embroiled in the conflicts of this time and place, whose populations includes winged seraphim, a few stray mythic beasts, perilous and beautiful Nephilim, and small, long lived humans who consider Sandy and Dennys giants. The boys find they have more to do in the oasis than simply getting themselves home--they have to reunite an estranged father and son, but it won't be easy, especially when the son is named Noah and he's about to start building a boat in the desert.

Genres

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Series

5 primary books6 released books

#4 in Time Quintet

Time Quintet is a 6-book series with 6 released primary works first released in 1962 with contributions by Madeleine L'Engle.

Series

8 primary books

#4 in Kairos

Kairos is a 8-book series with 8 released primary works first released in 1962 with contributions by Madeleine L'Engle.

Popular Reviews

Reviews with the most likes.

Katherine Hooper

Many Waters is the fourth book in Madeleine L???Engle???s TIME quintet. The previous three books, A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet have all focused on Meg Murray and her strange little brother Charles Wallace as they travel through time and space. Many Waters is completely different. In this story, Meg???s twin brothers Sandy and Dennis mess with a computer in their mother???s lab and get blasted back to the time of Noah before he built the ark. From there the story turns into a strange historical fantasy whose source text is Genesis 6.

In this well-known biblical story, God declares that humans are violent and corrupt... Read More: http://www.fantasyliterature.com/reviews/many-waters/

October 27, 2014

Amy

This is technically the fourth book written in Madeleine L'Engle's Time series, but in the life of the Murry family, it takes places third, so that's when I always read it. Rather than really exploring much of a scientific angle as Wrinkle and Wind do, the actual space-time travel element just kind of happens, and the majority of the book is focused on Sandy and Dennys's experience where they travel. As usual with L'Engle's books, I think the premise of this one is fascinating: Sandy and Dennys are taken to Noah's family before the flood and discover that although Noah's sons are in the biblical story, Noah also has daughters, one of whom because very special to both of them. Beyond the premise, though, I don't actually love this story. Sandy and Dennys are not only very vanilla, they also describe themselves that way, in a very stilted manner, continually referring to themselves as just being the normal ones in their family. The book stirs up some interesting questions, but it all just seems to be an elaborate setup to examine those questions, and even the minimal dramatic tension in the story (will the twins make it out before the flood? What about Yalith?) is wrapped up in fairly anticlimactic ways.

January 22, 2022