Many Waters by Madeleine L'Engle

This is the fourth book in the Wrinkle in Time series, although it really has nothing to do with A Wrinkle in Time except that it features the Murry family. It's extremely different from the first three, in which Meg and Charles Wallace are the main characters, and they get taken to weird worlds and times but are always based back at their home. In this book, however, Sandy and Dennys, their twin brothers, who are always preceded as the "logical and normal ones of the family," are accidentally swept away by an experiment of their dad's and get thrown back several thousand years to the time of Noah and the ark. They land in the desert and spend some time needing to recover from their severe sunstroke and figure out where they are, and in the process become close to Noah's whole family, including his father Lamech and his children who live with him, and they need to figure out how they will be able to get home.

I loved this look at the Noah story and the focus on the other characters that you don't hear about in the Bible story--namely the women. I felt like reading this book as a kid gave me a way better view of what it would have been like to live back then. I also really liked the magical/mythical creatures and people that lived at this time, like the seraphim and nephilim, and the mammoths and manticores, and I liked how L'Engle mixed this myth and history and even some science-fiction-y stuff in with it too (explaining how the twins got there and how they got home at the end of their time there). I think it's interesting re-reading this book now as an adult, because there is kind of a focus on sex, at least for Sandy and Dennys--they start off the book completely unaware of sex and totally innocent, and become kind of awakened to these possibilities as they are treated like adults and tempted by people there. It's definitely a clean book--but the possibilities are there and Sandy and Dennys think about them for the first time. The conclusion seems to be that having sex is something important and should only be done at the right time with the right person and not just wantonly, which I think is a good message for most people, especially the young audience who this book is written for (although obviously I would generally go a little farther than that). Overall, I still really enjoyed this book. It kind of reminded me of The Red Tent because of its Old Testament rewrite sort of style, although it was meant for a much younger audience than that one.