I loved Wrinkle when i was a kid. In reference to L'Engle's overtly Christian themes, upon rereading, i did not find them overwhelming. Instead i found them more as guild lines to deducing the your own spiritual interpretation, which i did and found it to be very enlightening. I felt the same about A Wind in the Door, and even enjoyed it more so than Wrinkle. A Swiftly Tilting Planet was just as good as the second, I only wish there were more about these characters. I plan on reading Many Waters, even though its about the twins as apposed to the character base i love.

Please do note that my five star review for Madeleine L'Engle: The Wrinkle in Time Quartet: A Wrinkle in Time / A Wind in the Door / A Swiftly Tilting Planet / Many Waters is NOT AT ALL about the actual contents and the specific thematics of Madeleine L'Engle's four Time Quartet novels. Because while I did read A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet and Many Waters in this here omnibus, in Madeleine L'Engle: The Wrinkle in Time Quartet: A Wrinkle in Time / A Wind in the Door / A Swiftly Tilting Planet / Many Waters I in fact and actually have reviewed each of the four books individually and as I finished with them. And therefore, if you go to the individual novels, you will be able to see and read my reviews for each of them, with A Wrinkle in Time receiving a three star rating, A Wind in the Door four stars, A Swiftly Tilting Planet once again three stars and Many Waters five stars (and with Many Waters most definitely being my hands-down favourite of Madeleine L'Engle's Time Quartet and probably after Meet the Austins my favourite L'Engle novel, period).

However, I do want to point out that if you are indeed interested in reading the stories Madeleine L'Engle has penned about the Murry Family and concerning their fantastical science fiction and fantasy imbued exploits and adventures in one all encompassing volume, you should in my opinion very seriously consider Madeleine L'Engle: The Wrinkle in Time Quartet: A Wrinkle in Time / A Wind in the Door / A Swiftly Tilting Planet / Many Waters (and no, neither the Murrys nor Calvin O'Keefe really play all that significant thematic roles in the four novels Madeleine L'Engle has written about Polly O'Keefe, with characters like Meg and Calvin O'Keefe generally simply textually existing and that the twins, that Sandy and Dennys Murry also very briefly appears in A House Like a Lotus, so if you want to read about the Murry Family in any amount of specific detail, well, you totally do need to read the four Time Quartet novels for that).

So yes, with regard to Madeleine L'Engle: The Wrinkle in Time Quartet: A Wrinkle in Time / A Wind in the Door / A Swiftly Tilting Planet / Many Waters, not only does this omnibus feature all four of the Time Quartet novels unabridged and complete, the fact that editor Leonard S. Marcus has also decided to add an informative timeline about Madeleine L'Engle's life, notes on the featured stories and a number of interesting articles (essays) penned by L'Engle about her work and how she views the universe, for and to me, this totally and majorly increases the reading pleasure and interest value of Madeleine L'Engle: The Wrinkle in Time Quartet: A Wrinkle in Time / A Wind in the Door / A Swiftly Tilting Planet / Many Waters exponentially and certainly does render me really happy and delighted to have read A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet and Many Waters in Madeleine L'Engle: The Wrinkle in Time Quartet: A Wrinkle in Time / A Wind in the Door / A Swiftly Tilting Planet / Many Waters and not separately, not individually. And honestly, truly, how Leonard S. Marcus shows and features Madeleine L'Engle: The Wrinkle in Time Quartet: A Wrinkle in Time / A Wind in the Door / A Swiftly Tilting Planet / Many Waters (and with all of the appreciated and wonderful supplementals), this all is certainly and spectacularly wonderful, superb and is in my opinion most well deserving of a five star rating simply and just for layout and set-up alone.

Though A Wrinkle in Time is my favorite of these, all the books in the series were very well done, and kept me interested throuought.

Apparently I have a love for books written for the younger set - teenagers. Seems that many of the authors just seem to work harder in that genre to produce a good book that also has literary merit. Must be all those "newberry-like" medals they're all striving for, but whatever it is, these fit.

If you've never read them, you've missed out.

I read these books when I was younger and loved them!

These books are some of the most incredible ever. I first found "Wrinkle" when I was about 12, and was thrilled to find more of L'Engle's books several years later. There's really no way to describe them, but they made me feel like anything was possible and that love is the center of the universe. Just wonderful.

I read these books when I was 11 or 12, it was right after I finished all of Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Sweet Valley kids/High/college and Babysitter's club..... THESE BOOKS OPENED MY EYES!!! I first read Madeleine's books as the Austin Family in the book of "A Ring of Endless Light", and I enjoyed it!! I found her other books.... and this was it! These books opened my eyes to sci-fi, multi-universe and fantasy books! Now I can say my genre of reading are mostly this. (I'll sometimes read a rom-com or mystery thriller, but I love fantasy now).

I RECOMMEND FOR ANYONE WITH A YOUNG KID, NIECE or NEPHEW.

Most people never get past A Wrinkle in Time, possibly because the level of weirdness just keeps going up and does get harder to follow...but Many Waters offers a great perspective on the biblical story of Noah.

The very first book that I read in my teen years that was fantasy was "A Wrinkle in Time". I got hooked. So when I came across this book by Madeleine L'Engle I purchased it. I did not know that it is a quartet of her books that starts out with "A Wrinkle in Time" and carries the same characters through the next three stories. I'm excited to start this series. I hope that I won't be disappointed because what one likes in there youth may change in adulthood. So here goes...

Well, I was disappointed. "A Wrinkle in Time" was ok but "A Wind in the Door" was horrendous. "A Swiftly Tilting Planet" just bounced from here to there and I was bored. The only saving grace was "Many Waters". I like it and it saved the whole book. It was about the twins going back in time. It had a plot that was interesting and it left out all that metaphysics jargon.

Even though these books are all fiction, they can be extremely thought provoking. I enjoyed the entire set. I re-read a wrinkle in time because of a book club. I then read the others just to finish the set. They have similar themes, and just a few discrepancies, but all in all are great reads.

Please read this. Madeleine L'Engle was once a guest speaker at Biola and spoke of children being able to fly. She wasn't invited back. Too wild, but grounded with not obvious Truth. Bible verses put so carefully into the conversation of children, it just sounds simple.

The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument.

I read the first story a long time ago; it was interesting to read it again this much later (I’m mainly doing so in preparation for reading the next two.)

A Wrinkle in Time is a very nice combination of fantasy and science fiction—in some ways, very much like Star Maker in that not only does it posit a universal divinity but that stars are also intelligent; unlike in Star Maker, however, stars do take part in the great fight between good and evil (though they have only a backstory role here).

The story is very much focused on Meg Murry, the oldest child in a family of four children, whose father has disappeared. He works for the United States government, and they say he’s fine but he hasn’t contacted them in a long time—I’m not sure they ever say exactly how long, but I get the impression for over a year. Everybody else in the community thinks he’s never coming back.

Meg would probably be a trouble-maker even without that burden; with it, she’s miserable.

IT, the incarnation of evil, offers solace and relief from that kind of pain by enforcing equality as uniformity. But it’s a lie. “IT could only give pain, never relieve it.” But IT has convinced those it takes over that the pain it gives is better than the pain that comes from knowing that other people have different opinions about you.

A Wind in the Door continues on the same theme, introducing strange new beings and traveling inward, rather than across the universe (though there’s a little bit of that, too, at least in imagination).

Both evil and good have new allies, and evil’s message is similar to that of IT in A Wrinkle in Time. Evil makes nothingness sound awfully nice, stating that “We are the ones who are glorious.”

When everything is nothing there will be no more war, no illness, no death. There will be no more poverty, no more pain, no more slums, no more starvation…

Stated like this, it is very reminiscent of a story or two in Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad, though here it is deadly serious. Evil is unNaming the world a piece at a time, and while this puts everyone in eventual danger it puts Charles Wallace in immediate danger. So Meg must join the song of life and Name or reName what evil endangers.

We are the song of the universe. We sing with the angelic host. We are the musicians. The farae and the stars are the singers. Our song orders the rhythm of creation.

A Swiftly Tilting Planet starts more clumsily than the first two, getting us caught up with all of the changes in the characters’ lives; where A Wind in the Door happened a year after A Wrinkle in Time, this third book takes place seven to ten years later. Oddly, where the previous books seemed to be placed somewhere in the near future, this one seemed to be more in the present or near past. The creatures are less imaginative, more standard fantasy, and Charles Wallace appears to have forgotten what happened in previous books.

I noted the similarity between A Wrinkle in Time and Star Maker, and here the similarity comes from a different direction: this is a series of travels through time, some real and some “projections”, which are mostly observational. To the extent that Charles Wallace affects the story, it is by shuttling information across generations, and the information is not exactly hidden from the people he’s shuttling it to anyway. Still an interesting story, but (a) confusing, and (b) less intriguing than the previous two.

My take on Many Waters is that it takes place around 1998 or so (“half a century” after the atomic bomb was first used) when scientists routinely travel to outer space. In this case that’s mostly just a frame around the real story which unravels in a different time and place altogether. It was a little hard to get into at first, because of the semi-paradisal nature of the place and time—it took me a couple of chapters to ignore the ahistorical elements. But once I realized what the author was doing, it made sense and turned into a very good story in a world halfway between an initial paradise and the modern mundane world.

The creatures are also interesting, again; though they draw on familiar ideas, L’Engle gives them all an interesting twist; and she also combines science with fantasy in a very nice way to both get the story going and to end it.

Most favorite books of all-time right here, with the last book being my favorite. I’ve read these umpteen times, and every time it gets better.