MANY WATERS [Paperback]

Madeleine L'engle (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Trade Paperback Edition edition (1986)
• ISBN-10: 0312368577
• ISBN-13: 978-0312368579
• ASIN: B00266DO7C
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (117 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Madeleine L'Engle, the popular author of many books for children and adults, has interspersed her writing and teaching career with raising three children, maintaining an apartment in New York and a farmhouse of charming confusion which is called "Crosswicks."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow..., May 21, 2005

A Kid's Review

This review is from: Many Waters (Time Quartet, Bk. 4) (Paperback)

I'm barely under 13, but I loved this book! As many other people said, it was more religious than the other books and it was much different, but I think that anyone can like it. It seemed like she decided to go with a different idea here, and I like it. The whole of the book seems much more earth-based and not so far out like in "A Wrinkle in Time" where an entire planet is controlled by a giant brain. I think this book is also good because no matter how many times you read it, you notice new details every time. I should know, I've read it four times.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars One of these things is not like the other, December 5, 2002

By 

Stacey M Jones (Conway, Ark.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Many Waters (Time Quartet, Bk. 4) (Paperback)

"Many Waters" was my least favorite of the four books in the "Time Quartet," but it was good. It just seemed VERY different from the three previous books that I read as a teenager. This book is about Meg and Charles Wallace's twin brothers Sandy and Dennys. The boys mistakenly get taken up by one of their father's space-time experiments and find themselves in a desert, rescued by a small oasis-dwelling man named Japeth. It turns out that they have found themselves in the Biblical story of Noah before the flood. The book details some of L'Engle's suppositions about the daily life of the the people then and also elaborates on the supernatural life of the time... seraphim were common visitors to the people of Noah's oasis as were something called "nephilim," which were once more godly creatures that turned their backs on god and began to marry and mate with humans. The boys get caught up in the stories of the relationships among all these "species" and have their own adventures. It's an interesting tale, but as I said, it is so different from the others, it wasn't what I expected.

The book is a little more overtly religious than the other books, but it's an interesting interpetation of what's always been a very puzzling chapter in Genesis (Gen 6) which talks about the sons of God mating with the daughters of men, and the Nephilim living among them. It's always seemed to be a bit of undigested ancient mythology that was never edited out of the biblical stories when Judaism became a more coherent and modern religion after the Babylonian exile. But l'Engel turns it into an interesting fantasy with a good deal of symbolic value, and makes it about love and faith and the miraculous power of God to bring good out of evil.

"Many waters cannot drown love," we are told, and that seems to be the point of the story.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Biblical fiction and a new book in my favorite series., July 18, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Many Waters (Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quintet) (Hardcover)

I was slightly sceptical when I was given Many Waters as apresent. I had read the three other books in the series, and was seton being a purist with the trilogy. I finally gave in and read this story which took me by suprise. Her story finally gives Sandy and Dennys a chance to experience something deeper than their limited minds had allowed them to in the last 3 books. On top of that, Ms. L'Engle weaves the twins into the fictionalized "behind the scenes" version of Noah's story in Genesis, pre-flood. I finished it in a matter of two nights. This was for me, as another reviewer noted, the first realization that Ms. L'Engle is a Christian writer. I immediately re-read all three original books with a fresh understanding of the underlying idea she was getting across. It was an instantaneous blessing for me. If you like these books, C.S. Lewis' Narnia Chronicles & Space Trilogy are musts. It really doesn't matter how old you are, there are blessings in these books for the young and the not-so-young! But don't take my word on it. Read it for yourself!