In an off-the-charts brilliant family with the ability to travel back and forth in time and space, Murry twins Sandy and Dennys are usually portrayed as cheerfully pragmatic, conventional boys. They go to school, play sports, try to teach their misfit savant siblings how to fit in with their peers, and they have “the twins’ vegetable garden.”

In Many Waters we meet the brothers on their own terms when, after messing with their parents’ computer, they are transported back to a time just before the Flood. To survive, they have to get back home before the rains start.

This is the most overtly biblical story of the Quintet; characters include Noah, Lamech, some good angels (seraphim), some bad angels (nephilim -anyone remember that X-Files episode?), and a scattering of unicorns and other supernatural beings. It’s interesting to read how L’Engle has chosen to portray the young men in terms of their reaction to hardship and their relationships with each other and with the desert beings they meet.

I view Many Waters as an outlier. I’m reasonably sure it’s the only book L’Engle wrote with male protagonists, and a hot desert here on Earth is quite the contrast to the settings of the other books. The only reason the boys are in this predicament is that they played with the computer; they were not overtly called to serve.

Unlike my experience with the first three titles, I am never compelled to revisit this story. I still believe it deserves four stars; I do recognize the beauty of the prose. ( )

These are a weird, uncommon and complex series that will change a kid's way of looking at books forever. I loved the books and the stories with such peculiar and funny characters.
Meg and Charles have a strong connection. Charles can even read his sister's mind.
The children use a tesseract (in the novel like a portal) to travel to other planets to save their father from evil that will attack Earth soon. Although the complex plot has a lot of science and math concepts, there's a strong Christian theme prevailing in the entire story. ( )

In the books that focused on Meg I never really like the twins but I loved them in this series. Also, as a atheist you would think I would not enjoy a book so religiously based but I always found this book to be intriguing and the characters very endearing. ( )

Now it's the twins' turn to save civilization on Earth, by being transferred to the ancient biblical time of Noah and family. L'Engle does a decent job in this story--similar to the prior book--of providing some moral compass for early teens. This time, it's about sex. ( )

This is an excellent book. The twins make for significantly more interesting characters than Meg and CW, who always felt like Mary Sues, and as such, were hard to care about. The ideas and storytelling here are fantastic, though L'Engle's writing falls ferociously flat whenever the twins talk to each other. She uses it to present exposition to the reader, but it comes off forced and unnatural; they're identical twins for fuck's sake, these are guys who share a lot of knowledge. Writing them as fish out of water works in the context of the story, but not in the context of their relationship. Anyway, great book, go read it. ( )