A Man With An Agenda

This series keeps going in weird directions, and I kinda dig it. I don't know how kids today would handle this, but adult me was taken in.

'Many Waters' is set some years before 'Swiftly Tilting Planet', likely the winter after 'A Wind in the Door'. The twins, Sandy and Dennys, are returning from an afternoon on the ice to an empty house. Their father is away on business and their mother has taken Meg and Charles Wallace to town for a doctor's appointment. Being teenagers, they're hungry and set about making a snack. The problem is they can't find the cocoa, and so head into their parent's lab to raid the stash there. They don't notice the "experiment in progress" sign on the door and fiddle with a computer. 

The boys are transported to a desert, luckily there's an oasis in sight, but the journey is hard for them and they wouldn't have made it except a local aids them with some help from a mammoth and unicorns.

Yes. Things are getting weird. This is good. 

Of course, certain editions of this give away the other shoe before it drops either on the cover or in the back-cover text: the boys are rescued by none-other than Japeth, one of Noah's sons. Yes. That Noah.

The book is about the twin's recovery from their ordeal in the desert, their adaptation to the unexplainable universe, and their first adult brush with love and loss. The conflict between the Nephilim and their former kin the Seraphim make up a large part of the plot as well. 

This made me remember my early Sunday school lessons about the flood and other early heavenly destructions. The flaw that the destroyed somehow deserve their fate still stands out. L'Engle's only real failure in this book is her attempt to soften the tragedy of the flood with certain plot devices I won't go into. All in all an interesting book.

Time Quintet

Next: 'An Acceptable Time'

Previous: 'A Swiftly Tilting Planet'