Amazon.com Review
We've all done it. In the frigid depths of winter we've wished we could be magically transported to someplace warm and sunny. But most people don't have genius parents who just happen to be working on a scientific experiment with time travel at the moment of our wish. Sandy and Dennys Murry, the "normal" boys in a family of geniuses, suddenly find themselves trudging through a blazing-hot desert, seeking a far-off oasis for shade. Their desperate wandering brings them face-to-face with history--biblical history. Soon they're feeling right at home with Noah and his family. Even so, the urgent question is, how will Sandy and Dennys get back to their own place and time before the floods--the many waters--come? As they begin to cross the invisible border into adulthood, the twins must confront their ability to resist temptation and embrace integrity.
In Many Waters, Madeleine L'Engle continues the Murry family saga, which includes A Wrinkle in Time; A Wind in the Door; and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which won the American Book Award. L'Engle's mystical mix of science fiction and fantasy, time and space travel, history, morals, religion, and culture once again urges her many adoring readers to stretch their minds and hearts to understand why the world is the way it is. (Ages 9 and older) --Emilie Coulter
From School Library Journal
Grade 6 Up Fans of the Murry family will welcome this tangental return to the "Time Trilogy" books (Farrar) as L'Engle spins another uniquely metaphysical fantasy, this time using the twins, Sandy and Dennys, at age 15, as her protagonists. On a cold day, Dennys absent-mindedly requests his father's computer to take them "someplace warm." Suddenly, it's the twins' turn to tessor, and they end up in a desert so hot that they nearly die of sun poisoning. As they meet the small people who inhabit it, including Lemach, Shem, Ham, Japheth, and finally, Noah, they realize that they are in the world as it existed before the Great Flood. What follows is an entertaining description of life in this ancient time and place, when angels and fallen angels walked the earth, and small mammoths could call unicorns into existence. The story is more tension than plot: the tension of the Nephilim, fallen angels whose power on earth seems somehow threatened by the mysterious arrival of the twins; the sexual tension that both Sandy and Dennys feel as they are drawn to Yalith, Noah's youngest daughter; and the tension that readers feel, wondering how those protagonists not mentioned in Genesis (the twins and Yalith) are going to survive the Flood, which is plainly imminent throughout the book. This suspense lacks the urgency found in the other books of the trilogy, however, mainly because the characters are subservient to atmosphere, incident, and ideas. It is as hard for readers to tell the twins apart as it is for Noah. One is curious as to how they will escape, but hardly worried. The strength of this book lies in its haunting descriptions of a time resonant of our own. Its weakness is a pat ending and characters so slightly drawn that we hardly care. Christine Behrman, New York Public Library
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
