Deborah Ideiosepius's Reviews > Many Waters

A tough review to write. I adored the first book in the Time Quintet so much that I forget that L'Engle's writing style is very hit and miss for me. Every time I see a book of hers I have not read, I get excited, but then I am usually disappointed by the actual reading experience.

This one was no different. We start within the same family that gave us the other Time Quintet books. The twins, Sandy and Denny accidentally go into their parents' lab while an experiment is running (to get the hot chocolate powder. I MUST NOT GET STARTED on the topic of cooking over a Bunsen burner in an empty house in a wet lab... must not... It is a kids book...move on Deborah! Move on...).

Consequently they are thrown way back in time/space to a fantasy land version of the old testament before the flood. This is really hard to review, because while I was reading the story I was often annoyed or impatient (no, not just with the Bunsen burner) and did not actually enjoy the reading experience that much. However, the story has stayed with me, I really love what L'Engle was trying to do in making the setting more like a fantasy novel than bible studies and on the whole, there were great concepts. A lot of the execution though did not really work for me and I can feel this review turning into one long complaint... While I whinge my way through the things that annoyed me, bear in mind that it is not a bad book, it is a pretty good one even, I just need to vent.

Let us start with the twins, Sandy and Denny are a bit interchangeable, I guess that is what makes twins useful in this story. Sandy and Denny also tell us that they are the 'practical' ones, the 'ordinary, non-scientific, non-genius members of the family. They start telling us that about page five and they are still telling us pretty much all through the book. Stop it already!

After they land in magical la la version of the bible, Sandy and Denny are separated and have different experiences of the oasis in which the story is mostly set. This is an excellent plot theme, it lets us see more of the people before the flood and explore the duality that is the theme of the whole Time Series. It also gave me time to suspect that the Twins, far from being practical are completely uneducated, since they keep thinking they might be on another planet. Who in the world has not heard of the story of Noah and the flood? Sure their parents were scientists and maybe not religious, but not figuring out where they were for so very long just annoyed me, it was contrived and unlikely. Maybe the magical flickering unicorns put them off.

I liked the magical fantasy interpretation of some the very coy descriptions that are provided in the bible about the Nephilim, here seen pursuing the daughters of man, with some success. While a theologian would probably get a headache from the way they were integrated in the story, I quite liked it. For a while I thought the Twins who keep being called 'giants' would also fulfill another ambiguous part of the bible where giants also mated with the daughters of man... but this is a kids book after all and that never went anywhere. Except for a few teenage crushing moments which were forgettable.

The narrative contradicts itself so much that I must have ground my teeth down an extra millimeter. And the most completely ludicrous example occurs on a single page, but the back-story first: The book has Seraphim (the good guys) versus Nephilim, both are originally angels, the Nephilim are now trapped on earth separate from God. Both Nephilim and Seraphim can transform at will between a roughly human form and a specific spirit animal. Not a bad concept at all. On page 186, where my most annoying example comes from, one of the twins is being carried by a Seraph in his Camel form when Twin is attacked. Camel transforms back into Admael to protect him and then does not transform back to Camel because "...It takes considerable energy to transform and we do not like to waste power when it is not necessary." At the bottom of the page, not two paragraphs later, you have the Nephilim standing in a circle flickering between forms like a TV holding pattern for no reason. That is the most dramatic of the many, many, many self contradictory annoyances in this book.

Oh, yes, those Seraphim? The good guys, they are completely inconsistent. They can't help humans with anything because it is interfering.... unless they can.... and they can a lot.... for no obvious reasons...except when they can't...also for no obvious reasons. They are a completely annoying Deus Ex Machina in the plot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex...

And speaking of Deus Ex Machina, when the Twins first arrive in the world one is injured and is carried to the oasis by a magical flickering unicorn that is only there if you believe in it. When the other twin is imprisoned, mistreated and threatened with death, it never occurs to him to summon a magical flickering unicorn until AFTER help arrives. Insert eye roll.

I should stop now, it is just exacerbating my annoyance and it is not a terrible book I have enjoyed ruminating about it after it was over, I have enjoyed that a lot more than the reading of it.

But before I stop. One more really, super annoying (for me) thing that kept cropping up. Regarding drinks; water is apparently too valuable to drink unless you are ill (I will pass over the fact that the Twins survived not drinking for months). After you have finished laughing hysterically at that magical impasse you may ask what they drank and it is fruit juice and wine. I will not even bother with the inherent idiocies in that but move on to the point that really annoyed me.

It will probably not stand out to anyone from the Northern parts of the world, but anyone who has lived in the Mediterranean or the Middle East might be with me on this: They drink fig juice all the time! L'Engle was from North America and probably thought that fig juice sounded all exotic and biblical and magical. To me it just sounds idiotic, there is less juice in a fig than in a potato, you could crush figs until kingdom come and end up with nothing more drinkable than fig paste. Google it and see, you can make a kind of thick shake with plenty of ice (water) or milk but you can't juice them. I can't even explain why I found this so annoying. Perhaps there were so many self contradictions, idiocies and unexplained stuff that I just sublimated all my annoyance into the innocent magical fig juice but the fact is that magical flickering unicorns bothered me less than the fig juice.