I think I’ve said it before, but the late, great Madeleine L’Engle is one of my go-to authors. So I was rereading Many Waters this weekend while jaunting back and forth all over the city. I can’t even count how many times I’ve read it, and it still makes my heart hurt in the most beautiful way. When I finished it this morning on the train, I totally choked up. It’s definitely my favorite of her Murray family books, which is funny because it’s the ones featuring Meg and Charles Wallace that get most of the critical acclaim: A Wrinkle In Time, A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet.

But I think I love Many Waters precisely because it focuses on Sandy and Dennys, the “normal” Murray siblings, who are smart but not the family’s oddball geniuses. It takes these practical analytical boys and drops them into the story of Noah and the flood. And I am such a mythology and religion geek that it never fails to suck me in when Sandy and Dennys encounter Noah’s family and seraphim and nephilim. L’Engle’s prose in this book is a tad bit shakier than in some of her other works, but the story is so beautiful that it transcends the weaker bits of text.