Posted on by TracyC

Moon Window

Moon Window by Jane Louise Curry, 1996.

Joanna Ellen Briggs (usually called JoEllen or Jo) lost her father five years ago, when he died in a car accident. Since then, it’s just been her and her mother. Jo has adjusted to the loss, and she and her mother have been happy together. At least, that’s what Jo keeps telling herself. Now, her mother is getting remarried, and Jo feels like her life has been completely turned upside down. Her new stepfather, George, is a nice man, but Jo can’t stand the idea of her life changing. George is a law professor, and Jo’s other relatives like him, but Jo is afraid of what this marriage will mean for her. She and her mother will be moving to George’s house in Boston, and she is afraid that nothing will ever be the same again.

At the heart of her worries is the fear of losing her mother, just as she lost her father. The truth is that Jo has never fully adjusted to her father’s death. She participates in a wide range of classes and activities, but it’s not because she really loves any of these subjects or activities. Her gymnastics, choir practice, piano lessons, and the host of other classes and hobbies that she pursues with so much energy and perfectionism are to keep her mind occupied so she won’t have to think about her father or her worries about what might happen to her if something happens to her mother. Ever since her father died, there has always been the lingering fear of something happening to her mother, and that’s why Jo fears change in her life. She has settled into a routine that makes her feel relatively safe and keeps her from thinking too much about what might happen in the future. George’s entry into their lives has broken the routine, will bring even more changes, and has caused Jo’s tightly-controlled feelings to creep to the surface.

Even during the wedding, Jo privately hopes something will happen that will stop the ceremony and keep all of these frightening changes from happening, but nothing does. However, Jo’s grandmother has noticed how upset Jo is, even though Jo tries to keep a blank face and hide her feelings. Her grandmother realizes that Jo is bottling up her emotions, and she sees the moment when Jo finally lets loose, just as her mother and George leave on their honeymoon. Instead of throwing birdseed after the car, like everyone else, she turns and throws her little bag of birdseed at one of George’s young nephews, hitting him in the eye.

Originally, the plan had been for Jo to stay with George’s brother and his family while her mother and George are on their honeymoon. However, because of her bad behavior toward George’s nephews, the boys’ mother refuses to have her as a guest. Jo’s grandparents hurriedly consider other arrangements for Jo. They would take her themselves, but they will soon be traveling to a conference they are attending. Jo’s grandmother laments about Jo’s behavior and moods, and that reminds her of Witch Ellen, an ancestor in an old painting at Winterbloom, the old house where her frail great-aunt lives. Granty Nell, as they call her, is actually a distant cousin and is over 100 years old, but she loves children. Jo’s grandmother remembers that one of Jo’s cousins recently visited Granty Nell at Winterbloom and had a wonderful time. Winterbloom is a strange old house near Walpole, New Hampshire, but Jo’s grandmother has fond memories of the place, and Granty Nell has live-in help, so she won’t be dealing with Jo alone.

Granty Nell accepts Jo as a visitor, but Jo is stunned that she has so suddenly been dumped with a relative she doesn’t even know, in an old stone house in the middle of the woods. At first, Jo plans to run away and go back to the apartment where she and her mother have been living and stay there until her mother comes to get her so her mother will regret leaving her and think twice about ever leaving her again. However, Winterbloom is no ordinary place, and leaving is much more difficult than Jo realizes.

Granty is unexpectedly sharp in spite of her age, and she can read Jo like a book, noting her thinness and chewed fingernails. She speaks openly to Jo about her feelings about her new stepfather on her first day at Winterbloom. Granty lets her speak and doesn’t criticize her feelings. Instead, she tells Jo a little about the house and their ancestors, and she offers to let her explore the house and choose one of the guest bedrooms for herself. When she decides which room she wants, she can tell the housekeeper, Mrs. Craig. Mrs. Craig’s husband Thomas and son Tom take care of the grounds and garden of Winterbloom. The three of them live in a little cottage nearby, so only Granty and Jo will be living in the big house.

As Jo explores the old house alone, she notices that the furnishings are rich but old and shabby. She wonders why Granty hasn’t replaced them because she is supposedly wealthy. Each of the bedrooms has a fireplace that has an iron Franklin stove fitted inside and wardrobes instead of closets. The furnishings are all old-fashioned and a little shabby, but there is something in every room that catches Jo’s attention, like an interesting painting or an embroidered stool. In spite of herself, Jo finds herself liking things or becoming intrigued by them, although she is still determined to run away. Then, while exploring the attic, she finds an old turret room with a round window, the kind that her mother likes to call a “moon window.” Jo tries to open the window, but she discovers that someone has painted it shut. She manages to pry it open anyway, using a knife that she finds in Granty’s desk drawer. Outside the window, there is a large tree, good for climbing. Jo realizes that, with her gymnastics skills, it would be easy for her to climb down the tree and escape when it’s time for her to run away.

Thinking that she’ll probably only stay for one night before running away, Jo chooses the yellow bedroom, the one with a high bed with yellow brocade curtains that has a step stool for climbing into it. Granty tells her that is the room where her grandmother stayed when she came to visit Winterbloom when she was young. Winterbloom is undeniably charming, in spite of its shabbiness, and Jo can’t help but think that the dining room, with its tapestries and long, candlelit table looks like it’s set for a fairy tale feast.

To Jo’s surprise, Granty tells her a little of her own history at dinner. Like many of the women in their family, Granty’s first name is Ellen, although the younger generations think of her as Granty Nell. Jo had assumed that Granty had grown up at Winterbloom, but actually, she originally lived in New York. Like other young girls in the family, she also came to visit Winterbloom as a child when the woman that she once called Granty lived there. When Granty Nell was 17 years old and having one of her visits to Winterboom, both of her parents died in a flu epidemic. (I thought at first that she was referring to the 1918-1919 Influenza Epidemic, but later events in the story show that the dates don’t line up. Her parents must have died earlier.) As an orphan, she continued living at Winterbloom with her Granty until the following September, when she went away to college. She was a schoolteacher for a time until her Granty died, leaving her Winterbloom and all of her money, on the condition that she change her last name to Macallan, which is the family’s maternal surname. Granty Nell wasn’t originally happy about having to change her name, but she did it anyway because she loved Winterbloom. Jo wishes that someone would give her a house to live in so she wouldn’t have to live with George. George’s house in Boston is very modern and definitely not charming. Granty Nell tells her to be careful about what she wishes for because, since she returned to Winterbloom, she hasn’t traveled very far from it, and there are many interesting places she has never seen. Clinging too much to one particular place can keep a person from moving on to other, more exciting places.

Although someone (possibly Mrs. Craig or Granty) has tried to make the yellow room more cozy for Jo by moving all the things that she admired in the other rooms into that room, Jo is still determined to run away. She almost resents how comfortable Winterbloom is for her, making it difficult for her to leave. Early in the morning, Jo slips out through the moon window in the attic and climbs down the tree from the house. She originally planned to ride her bike the two miles from Winterbloom into town because her grandparents left her bike there for her to use, but she can’t find the bike when she reaches the ground. She assumes that the Craigs must have moved it and that she’ll have to walk to town to catch the bus.

However, during her early morning walk to town, it slowly begins to dawn on her that something isn’t right. She overhears some children talking about a cannon, which is strange. Then, she has an encounter with a man on horseback, who talks like he’s a local doctor who’s been out to see patients. Since when do doctors ride around on horses to see their patients? Jo becomes more uneasy, and when she reaches the town, she realizes why. The town doesn’t look the way it did when she passed through it with her grandparents. Suddenly, there is no Interstate highway, and there is a covered wooden bridge that isn’t there anymore in Jo’s time. Somehow, it looks like going through the window has sent Jo back in time, although she’s not sure when or if that’s really what is happening. Disoriented and terrified, Jo returns to Winterbloom and climbs back up to the moon window, leaving her knapsack hidden in some bushes to retrieve later.

The next day, Jo tries to tell herself that what happened early that morning was only a dream, but there are hints that it wasn’t. Not only is her bike exactly where she left it, like it never moved, but the bush where she left her knapsack isn’t there anymore, and there’s no sign of the knapsack. Jo searches the area to check if she was just mistaken about where she left the knapsack, but it really isn’t there. When Granty suggests that they go into town for lunch, Jo sees that the gate to Winterbloom isn’t the same in the present as it was in the past, and the road to town is paved while the road she walked along in the early morning wasn’t. Yet, there are aspects of the countryside that are eerily familiar, which indicates that what she experienced wasn’t just a dream. She might have been able to dream about the road and town as they were in the past, but she shouldn’t have been able to accurately dream about features of the area that she hadn’t seen before and that have been there for a long time.

Their trip to town is cut short because Granty becomes ill. Young Tom, who is driving them, says that Granty suffers from agoraphobia, which is why she gets ill or panics when she gets too far from Winterbloom. This is part of the reason why she has not traveled very far since she inherited the house. Granty later says that this isn’t entirely the case, but through many years of living at Winterbloom, it has become more and more difficult for her to leave it.

Jo still plans to run away, and she realizes that she left her flashlight in her knapsack, wherever that is now. She decides to search the attic for something she can use instead. In spite of herself, she finds the old clothes in the trunks in the attic charming and decides to try wearing some of them. Then, at the bottom of one of the trunks, she finds her knapsack! The knapsack isn’t the way it was when she last saw it, though. It has clearly aged, and so have the things inside. The flashlight no longer works, the clothes are yellowed with age, and the leather and rubber on her hiking boots has hardened and cracked. It’s like they’ve been stored in the attic for more than 100 years! The boots are wrapped in a newspaper, now deteriorated, but when Jo examines it, she finds the date of July 1809 and references to some of the people and things she encountered during her early morning excursion. Now, Jo is really scared.

Jo races to the turret room and looks out the moon window, but what she sees frightens her more. Although it’s afternoon in Winterbloom, it’s dark outside the moon window. More than that, there’s no tree outside the window, and the countryside that she sees isn’t the woods that surround Winterbloom. Jo recognizes what she sees as the same scene in a painting in her room at Winterbloom. The moon window is no ordinary window. It looks out on different times and places.

Once she gets over her fear, Jo is intrigued at this “window of time” and wants to know more about how it works. She even thinks that, if she can learn to control it, she might be able to go back in time to just the right moment to keep her mother from getting married again, which she thinks will solve all of her problems. However, the next time she tries the window, she finds herself meeting a young Granty Nell in 1897, when she was just a girl about her age called Nell, which is short for Ellen. Nell catches her sneaking around in a dress that looks very much like her dress. (Really, it’s the same dress, just aged about 90 years because Jo found it stored in the attic and tried it on.) Jo attempts to explain to her who she is and how she got there, taking Nell to the turret room in the attic and showing her the moon window. Jo is curious where the moon window will lead if they go through it in the past, wondering if it will take them to the future, but it ends up leading them further into the past. Jo and Nell end up in 1764, when the house was first being built. They are both caught sneaking around by a young Indian (Native American) and the stonemason who is building the house for Ellen Hawke. Ellen is a common name for women in their family, and this Ellen was the one who created Winterbloom and the one for whom all the other Ellens were named, including JoEllen. She is also considered a “wise woman”, and she is the Witch Ellen who appears in a painting at Winterbloom. Jo recognizes the stonemason’s last name as her grandmother’s maiden name, making her wonder if they are also somehow related. She wonders if maybe the stonemason will marry Ellen Hawke, making him her distant ancestor.

As Jo begins to consider people’s complex relationships across time, it occurs to her that, if she and Nell aren’t careful, they might accidentally change something in the past that will endanger their own existence. For the first time, she also begins to wonder what might happen if she successfully changes things so her mother never meets or marries George. Is it possible that she would be preventing the potential birth of a half-sibling, and if so, is that what she really wants to do?

Back in the present day, Granty Nell begins remembering an incident from her youth that she always thought of as a dream with a girl named Joanna and a trip back in time, and she begins connecting it with some strange questions Jo has been asking her. Years ago, Granty Nell had removed the furnishings from the turret room (the ones which Jo had delighted in and are now her the Yellow Bedroom that she is using) and scattered them through the house. She had the moon window painted shut and kept the door to the turret room locked, sensing that the moon window was magical and dangerous. Now, in spite of Nell’s precautions, things are coming full circle, and Jo is doing what Nell realizes she has done before.

Although Granty Nell loves having Jo at Winterbloom, she begins to realize that she must get Jo away from the place as soon as possible, before Jo becomes trapped in the same web that has kept Nell herself tied so tightly to Winterbloom all these years. Solving the mysteries of Winterbloom and the spell it has on the other Ellens in the family means exploring the past of the first Ellen, Witch Ellen.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoilers

I enjoyed this story and its atmosphere! I think fans of Cottagecore would enjoy Winterbloom, with its old-fashioned, comfortable shabbiness and rooms with quaint, magical touches. This is also one of those books that mentions what the characters eat. I’m not much of a foodie, but there were a couple of things that interested me about their meals at Winterbloom. I find it interesting when books mention unusual dishes or foods that they call by unfamiliar names. At one point, they have what Granty calls “Indian cake” for lunch. It’s described as a type of corn bread, so I think it’s named for Native Americans rather than Indians from India. (I ask that question almost every time I see “Indian” in writing, unless it’s specified.) I’d never heard of that before, so I tried looking it up, and from the description, I think it might be similar to this recipe for a corn bread pound cake from 1827. I’m not 100% sure it’s the same thing, but it seems reasonable because it’s described as both a corn bread and a cake. As charming as Winterbloom is, though, it also has a dark side that Jo must confront.

Themes

Jo’s immediate problem is obvious from the beginning of the story. There have been many other children’s books about children adjusting to changes in their lives, including the remarriage of a parent. It’s understandable that children who are accustomed to having only one parent might cling to that parent and be afraid of changes that might cause them to lose that parent or experience less of that parent’s attention and affection. Although adults might say that coming to love someone else doesn’t mean loving other people less, but Jo already knows that, when her mother spends more time with George, she spends less time with Jo. Her mother still loves her, but Jo feels neglected and forgotten, fearful of what this will mean for her future and her relationship with the only parent she has left. Even before her mother married George, there were times when her mother was so preoccupied, thinking about George, that she forgot to get breakfast for Jo or buy groceries, as she normally did, making Jo nervous about her mother still providing for her through this relationship with George. I’m sure that her mother doesn’t mean to give Jo this feeling. It’s just part of the awkwardness of making a major change in their lives and adjusting to a new normal. I’ve reviewed others on this theme before, including The Haunting at Cliff House, which also features time travel.

There are a couple of things that make this story different from others that I’ve read. One that surprised me at first is that Granty Nell knows about the magic of the window. In many books for kids that involve magic and time travel, the adults don’t know what’s going on and never learn. The magic or time travel is meant to give the children in the stories perspective on their lives and problems and teach them lessons, not to do anything for the adults. Typically, the adults either don’t know what’s going on, while the children learn about the magic or face their problems on their own, or the adults don’t find out what’s been happening until after the child has resolved the situation, like Rose in The Root Cellar, which is about an orphan adjusting to a new life with her relatives. In this story, Granty Nell has known about the magic of the moon window since she was young, when she first met Jo on one of her time travel excursions. At first, Nell thought that Jo was a dream, but through her years with the house, she came to understand the dangers of the window and the hold that the house can have on people, particularly on young girls named Ellen, who are coping with the loss of a home or a parent.

It isn’t obvious right away, but this is also a story about generational trauma, but with a magical/supernatural twist. Like other Ellens in the family, the first Ellen, Ellen Hawke (maiden name Ellen MacAlpin, also called Ellen MacAllan or Witch Ellen) also suffered the lost of her father and home early in life. The family’s ancestral home, Castle MacAlpin in Scotland, was destroyed by fire, and her father died in the fire. Ellen wanted to save him, but she couldn’t. The MacAlpins were unusual people, who possessed real magic, and Nell thinks that they might actually be descended from elves. After her father died, Ellen married, and later in life, after her husband died, she went to New Hamsphire to start over. People were always nervous about her and her magical abilities, so whenever it looked like people might be about to put her on trail for being a witch, she would move and start over.

Like Granty Nell, Witch Ellen has also lived an unnaturally long life, and (spoiler) she is still living secretly in Winterbloom. At least some of the other Ellens in the family were also her, pretending to be one of her own descendants. When she came to New Hampshire, she built a new version of the home that she had lost, which is Winterbloom. The shabby, old-fashioned belongings in the house are actually a clue to the house’s true problem. Granty can’t change things too much, even when she wants to, because Witch Ellen won’t let her. The house is a monument to her old life, and she can’t let go of it. However, Ellen eventually discovered that Winterbloom was a poor substitute for her lost home. It’s undeniably a charming house, but it’s not the original castle, so it just couldn’t be the same and would never feel the same to Ellen.

When Jo finally speaks to Witch Ellen directly, she admits that, rather than bringing her solace, Winterbloom haunts her because it can’t be what she wants it to be. Witch Ellen tells Jo that, for a long time, she has been waiting for a descendant of hers to undo a terrible mistake that she made years before, which has kept her bound to the house. That is, assuming that Witch Ellen is telling the truth.

For most of the book, readers don’t know what’s behind the magic of the house or if the witch in the family is in control of what’s happening. I expected at first that Witch Ellen would be a sympathetic character who would help Jo to understand the magic and maybe teach her something to help her cope with her situation, but that isn’t the case. Jo must confront the question of whether the mission that Ellen gives her would really break the spell of Winterbloom or if the curse of Winterbloom was always Ellen’s inability to accept life as it came and to try to control the outcomes. Ellen was always a controlling person, and her own children left her and Winterbloom years ago because she frightened them. Witch Ellen was never satisfied with her life, even the parts that were really good, because she couldn’t let go of the old home that she lost. Her new home, the men she married, and even her own children were never good enough for her because she was clinging to her memories of her old life and her plan to get it back. It was an obsession with her, and it has guided everything she has done. When Ellen became Nell’s guardian as her “Granty”, she began controlling her, keeping her bound to Winterbloom all these years to accomplish what she wanted. When Nell wouldn’t do it, Ellen began searching for another descendant who would, which is why she keeps inviting other young descendants to visit Winterbloom.

Jo is capable of doing what Ellen asks, but she has begun to see Ellen’s selfishness for what it really is. Ellen is prepared to sacrifice the lives and futures of her descendants to change the past, without regard for what that would mean for anyone else. Jo is different because she can see the bigger picture, and she does care about other people. She worries about her future, and that’s why she is afraid of the changes brought by her mother’s remarriage, but she has come to see that there are limits to what she’s prepared to do about that because of her concern for the welfare of other people. Jo realizes that she doesn’t want to be trapped at Winterbloom forever or to endanger her very existence and the existence of other people in her family to accomplish Ellen’s mission.

In many books about children coming to accept stepparents, the children come to suddenly love the stepparents at the end of the book, or at least find something about them to appreciate or an ability to see things as the adults around them do. That isn’t the case with this book. Maybe Jo will come to appreciate George once she becomes more accustomed to him and her new life, but for now, she has come to see that trying to control other people’s lives can be truly damaging, not just to them but also to other people around them and even to herself, and that it isn’t healthy to remain stuck in the past. Although accepting change can be difficult and can sometimes mean accepting bad outcomes along the way, Jo comes to see that she would rather keep moving forward in life and letting others move forward.

If something bad hadn’t happened in their family centuries before, maybe none of them would even exist now. Maybe accepting her mother’s marriage to George will one day mean accepting a younger half-sibling and having to share her mother with George and that sibling, but Jo recognizes that this half-sibling has the right to exist as much as she does. The half-sibling is only a potential idea at this point, not a firm reality, but the knowledge that there could potentially be one someday causes Jo to think about the effect that her decisions can have on people, including possible future generations. Letting her mother, George, and the potential half-sibling have their lives will mean having to make some changes to her own life, but Jo sees that it also allow her room to consider new possibilities for her own life in the future and to keep moving forward. The contrast between having the ability to move forward and being stuck in the past is enough to convince Jo to stop fighting her mother’s marriage and to focus on moving forward and seeing what life holds.

Children’s Literature References

This is one of those children’s books that also references other children’s books. Because generations of children have visited Winterbloom, Jo finds old children’s books on the shelves there, like The Five Children and It by E. Nesbit and a Nancy Drew book from the 1930s. When Jo reads The Five Children and It, she reads a part about how people can make themselves wake up at a particular time without an alarm clock by really focusing on the time they want to wake up before they go to bed. I haven’t read this book yet, but I have done that before, made myself wake up at a particular time because I had it in my mind that was when I wanted to get up. It does seem to work at least sometimes, although The Five Children and It says that it only works if you really, really want to wake up at that particular time. If you don’t really want to get up, it won’t work. When Jo reads the Nancy Drew book, she tells Granty that she’s surprised that Nancy Drew is that old, and Granty tells her how the Nancy Drew books are periodically rewritten to update them with the current time and habits, changing language and technology to be current. This is true, and I’ve talked about that on this site before. As this story notes, in the original books, people were driving roadsters and using typewriters, and in the updated versions, they have sports cars and computers.

Posted on by TracyC

The Little White Horse

The Little While Horse by Elizabeth Goudge, 1946.

The year is 1842, and Maria Merryweather is on her way to her family’s ancestral home, Moonacre Manor. Thirteen-year-old Maria is an orphan. Her mother died when she was a baby, and now, her father has died. Their house in London had to be sold to pay his debts, and now, Maria is going to live with a distant cousin, Sir Benjamin Merryweather, in the country. She is traveling with her nurse, Miss Heliotrope, who has taken care of her since she was little and is like a mother to her, and her dog, Wiggins. Maria and her father were never really close. Maria isn’t sure that she’s going to like living in the country because she is accustomed to city life and the luxuries that come with it. She fears that life in the country will be rough and full of deprivation.

Maria begins to feel better when she actually sees Moonacre. It’s a lovely, romantic, castle-like manor house. The manor also gives her an odd feeling of home because so many Merryweathers have lived there for so long. Sir Benjamin welcomes her, and she likes him immediately. Oddly, Sir Benjamin refers to has as “one of the silver Merryweathers”, saying that she was born during a full moon. It’s true that Maria has unusual silvery gray eyes. Sir Benjamin says that he’s a “sun Merryweather”, born at midday, but that’s okay because moon Merryweathers and sun Merryweathers get along well. He does have a rather warm, sunny appearance.

Sir Benjamin shows them around the manor and to their rooms. The furnishings are a little shabby, but they’re quite comfortable, and they like their new rooms. Maria is charmed because her room is in a turret, and it has a very small door that’s really only big enough for a small girl like her to get in. Miss Heliotrope is worried that she won’t be able to get into Maria’s room if she is ill and needs her, but Maria is sure that isn’t going to be a problem. She loves the room because it just seems so perfect for her. Wiggins even seems to be getting along with Sir Benjamin’s big, old dog, Wrolf, although Maria has some doubts that Wrolf is actually a dog because he doesn’t look like any dog she’s ever seen before.

At dinner that evening, Sir Benjamin talks about giving Maria riding lessons, saying that he has a little gray pony who would be just right for her. Maria mentions a beautiful white horse that she saw from the carriage as they were approaching the manor, but Miss Heliotrope didn’t see it and thinks she just imagined it. Miss Heliotrope thinks that Maria imagines things all the time, like the little boy named Robin, who had a feather in his cap and was a childhood playmate, but Maria insists that the boy really did exist and so does the little white horse. Thinking about Robin makes her wish that he was here to keep her company at Moonacre, but she hasn’t seen him for a couple of years and doesn’t know where he is.

There are a few odd things that Maria and Miss Heliotrope notice about Moonacre, though. Aside from the odd dog, Wrolf, Sir Benjamin seems oddly evasive about who and where the servants are. They never see them, yet someone has been doing the cooking and cleaning and making fires in the fireplaces. There’s even a fire in Maria’s room, but she can’t figure out how anyone got in to make one since the door is too small for even an adult Miss Heliotrope’s size.

The next day, a riding habit appears in Maria’s room. It’s very nice quality, even though Maria can tell that it’s second-hand because it’s an older style and a little worn and has the initials LM on it. Maria like it, but who used to own it, and who put it in her room? In the parlor attached to her room, Maria also sees an old painting that contains a white horse and an animal that looks something like Wrolf, although she’s still not quite sure what kind of animal it is. (What’s that “brave-looking” animal that has a tawny mane and a tuft on its tail? I’m sure if we think about it, it will come to us.)

Sir Benjamin tells Maria that she shouldn’t wander the countryside alone, but she is free to explore as long as she’s with her pony Periwinkle or Wrolf. The one place he doesn’t want her to go is Merryweather Bay because there are rough fishermen there. He refers to Maria as a “princess” and the area around Moonacre as her “kingdom,” and from the way he says it, it seems that he somehow means that literally. Even the local people seem to have some kind of awe and respect for her.

Maria finds the nearby village of Silverydew charming. The Old Parson introduces her to the children of the village, and they tell her about the mysterious “Black Men” (because they all wear black, not their race) who hang out in the woods and by Merryweather Bay. They set traps for animals and steal livestock from the locals, and everyone is afraid of them.

Maria also discovers that Robin is here in the village of Silverydew, and he rescues her from an encounter with the Black Men. Robin tells her that her ancestor, Sir Wrolf, who founded the Merryweather family, was the one responsible for making the Black Men as evil as they are, and because of that, his soul has been unable to enter Paradise. Locals say that his spirit rides around nearby Paradise Hill, weeping because of what he did, and he will continue to do it until someone finds a way of solving the problem he caused.

Maria asks what exactly Sir Wrolf did, and Old Parson tells her the story of Sir Wrolf and how he acquired the lands around Moonacre. At first, Sir Wrolf just owned the land where the manor house sits, but he wasn’t satisfied with that. Although he was known for being brave and jovial, he was also a greedy and selfish person who thought that he was entitled to take anything he wanted from anyone. First, he kicked the monks out of the monastery on Paradise Hill and used the monastery for a hunting lodge. A fierce lightning storm made him abandon it later because he believed that it was sent by the monks as punishment. Then, he decided that he wanted the woods and bay around Moonacre for hunting and fishing, but they belonged to another nobleman called Black William. He tried various ways to take those lands from Black William, including direct warfare, but he was unsuccessful. Then, it occurred to him that Black William had a lovely daughter, his only child, and if he married her, he would share in her inheritance. Sir Wrolf put on a show of apologizing to Black William and demonstrating that he had mended his ways so he could win the affection of Black William’s daughter. The daughter, who was called the Moon Princess because she was as fair and lovely as the moon, believed that Sir Wrolf was sincere and married him. Sir Wrolf did end up falling in love with his bride, and they had a child together, but the lands he expected to acquire through her were still on his mind. Then, Black William suddenly remarried, and his new wife gave birth to a son, who replaced the Moon Princess as the heir to Black William’s lands. Sir Wrolf was outraged by this reversal of fortune, and while he ranted about it, he let slip how he had married his wife in the hopes of getting her lands. The Moon Princess was shocked and hurt, and although her husband insisted that he had come to love her even though he had married her for selfish reasons, she no longer believed him. She grew to hate him for his deception and even turned against the son they had together. She wanted no part of Sir Wrolf’s life anymore. Then, worse still, word reached them that Black William had mysteriously disappeared and his young son was dead. Although there were no indications of foul play, and it was possible that neither of them had really died at all, the Moon Princess came to believe that her husband was a murderer. One day, she rode away on the little white horse that her husband had given her when they married, and she was also never seen or heard from again. With Black William and his son and daughter gone, Sir Wrolf finally had possession of the lands he had coveted for so long, but he was no longer happy. He genuinely missed his wife and felt guilty for what he had done, and he couldn’t enjoy his prize.

The Old Parson explains that the sins of the past still affect the present and will continue to do so until someone makes them right again. The Black Men who now inhabit the disputed lands are probably the descendants of Black William’s supposedly dead son. The Old Parson believes that the boy’s mother probably feared what Sir Wrolf might do to the boy when his father left them, so she pretended that he was dead already. Every generation of Merryweathers since then have tried to push the Black Men out of the disputed lands, but they’ve never been successful. Also, every generation, a young woman very much like the Moon Princess comes to Moonacre, and she gets along well with the sun-like Merryweathers, but so far, a quarrel has always separated them. Maria worries about that because she likes her cousin Sir Benjamin and doesn’t want to leave Moonacre. Old Parson tells her that part of the legend of Moonacre is that, some day, there will be a Moon Princess who will come and will not leave. The legend states that she will right the wrongs of the past and make peace again, but only if she can get over the prideful nature that all Moon Princesses have and love a poor man who is below her station. The townspeople are in awe of Maria because they hope that she will turn out to be that Moon Princess.

Maria adopts the mission of righting past wrongs, reconciling old quarrels, and bringing peace to the valley once again, but she’ll have to be careful. Not everyone is ready for peace yet, and she has to guard against falling into the same bad habits that others have before her. Before she can complete her destiny, she must speak directly to the Black Men in their castle and when she does, they make a bargain with her. They agreed to end their poaching and thievery if she can prove that Black William wasn’t murdered by Sir Wrolf and if she will restore not only their lands but the pearl necklace that belonged to the original Moon Princess. However, that necklace has been missing since the first Moon Princess disappeared. How can Maria give them something that she doesn’t have and doesn’t know how to find?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including one in Chinese). There is also a movie version of the story called The Secret of Moonacre.

My Reaction and Spoilers

I didn’t read this book as a kid, but it’s one that I’ve been meaning to read for some time. I saw the movie version years ago, and I was curious about what the book was like. The movie and the book set up a somewhat different situation for the quarrel between the two families. In the movie, the quarrel was about the fabulous pearls owned by the first Moon Princess and not about land. Also, Loveday and Robin were members of Black William’s family in the movie, which they weren’t in the book, changing the dynamics of their relationships with Sir Benjamin and Maria.

This story is an enchanting light fantasy. The setting by itself is magical, and Maria’s rooms in the manor are like every little girl’s dream! The story also includes odd, seemingly intelligent animals with unusual capabilities, such as the Zachariah the cat, who takes messages for people and lets them into the manor house or guides them around, and Wrolf, who is clearly a lion, even though everyone calls him a dog. The fact that Wrolf is a lion dawns on Maria toward the end of the book, and Robin confirms that’s true, saying that they all keep calling him a dog because it sounds less scary, and they don’t want to alarm anyone.

Maria’s family history is not something to be proud of, as Old Parson points out. Her ancestors were not the greatest people, in spite of their land-ownership and high status. People are looking to Maria to be better than the others who came before her and to make past wrongs right.

From Robin’s mother, Loveday Minette, who also becomes like a mother to her, Maria learns a little more about what it means to be one of the Merryweather “Moon Princesses.” Gradually, it is revealed that Loveday was the last Moon Princess before Maria. She was in love with Sir Benjamin, and the two of them were going to be married, but like all Moon Princesses and Merryweather men, they had a stupid quarrel and parted. Loveday married someone else and had Robin, but even though she has remained near Moonacre and secretly helps the household, she has been careful not to see Sir Benjamin ever since. Over the years, she has come to realize that she made a terrible mistake with Sir Benjamin and regrets it, but like other Moon Princesses, she has too much pride to admit that she was wrong and apologize. She is more mature now, and she sees that, in some ways, she was aggravating to Sir Benjamin and provoked him, and having provoked him to anger, because Moon Princesses tend to love men with tempers (one of the curses of the Merryweather men), was too proud to make up with him. By the same token, Sir Benjamin was legitimately disrespectful of her and her feelings, and when he attempted an apology, it was a half-hearted effort that attempted to preserve his pride more than demonstrate care for Loveday’s feelings, which is why Loveday didn’t feel like she could accept it.

Members of the Merryweather family and the people they marry have a tendency to attach enormous importance to and emotional investment in small things (geraniums, the color pink, etc. – they either passionately love these things or are violently or oppressively against them), and then they blow up at each other when their partner doesn’t feel exactly the same way about them, taking it as personal insult if someone likes something they don’t like or doesn’t like something they do like. (Like in the Internet meme, “Stop liking what I don’t like!”) They don’t know how to tolerate interests they don’t share, not sweat the small stuff, or live and let live. I would say that a lot of it has to do with poor relationship skills and, ultimately, a lack of respect for other people, even the people they love. They don’t respect each well enough to find out why the other person cares so much about something that seems small and annoying. They are self-absorbed in their own feelings, seeing situations only from their own point of view and putting their own feelings first. They see every conflict as some kind of contest about who’s right, with the drive to win against each other, which puts them both in a position of being on opposite teams instead, where one of them has to get the better of the other in some way, instead of on the same winning team. The result is that neither of them ever really wins, and even if one of them defeats the other in something, they ultimately end up losing their whole relationship, so it’s a net loss for everybody.

This is the cycle that has repeated for generations in this family. Loveday realizes that, for this destructive cycle to end, the Moon Princess has to learn not to provoke the one she loves as well as overcome her sense of pride. Also the Moon Princess’s love (it’s pretty clear to everyone that it’s going to be Robin, in this case) has to learn to control his temper, not respond to things as if they were some kind of personal attack, and consider the well-being of others, especially his princess. Both of them need to learn caring and consideration for others and how to put aside pride and self-interest for the sake of peace, both in their personal relationship with each other and for the sake of the wider community. Loveday emphasizes to both Maria and Robin that they must not quarrel with each other. People are depending on them to put things right in the area, and their own future happiness depends on learning to get along with each other.

The things Loveday and other adults emphasize for the children are personal skills that real people do need to learn in order to have relationships with other people and be mature members of a peaceful, stable community:

  • Don’t aggravate people. You can’t have peace if you’re always teasing or provoking people, and picking fights.
  • Choose your fights carefully, and wherever possible, avoid turning small disagreements into big fights. Remember that any battle comes with a cost, and the costs of petty fighting are higher than the rewards.
  • Be considerate of other people’s feelings and respectful of their property. You don’t have the right to do what you want with other people’s property just because you want it or it bothers you that they have it.
  • Understand that nobody is perfect, including you.
  • It is not your partner’s responsibility to please you in every way or give you everything that you want. It is your responsibility to deal with your own emotions and control your own choices and behavior.
  • Sometimes, you really are in the wrong, and you can’t always have everything you want. Accept both of these facts with maturity and take responsibility for your choices.
  • Being wrong can be embarrassing, but not nearly as embarrassing or destructive as not dealing with situations that need attention or problems that need to be solved.
  • The problems you cause affect more than just you, and problems do not go away when they are ignored.
  • Whatever the circumstances, no matter who or what you’re dealing with, it’s never just about you.
  • The word “responsible” has two meanings. The first is being at fault. (Sir Wrolf was responsible for the situation in the valley and the problems it caused.) The second just means taking charge of a situation and doing what needs to be done, sometimes because you’re the only one who can or is willing to do it. (Maria didn’t cause the problems, but she was responsible because she fixed the problems.) The second type of “responsible” is necessary for successful relationships, no matter who the first type applies to.
  • Love requires understanding and accepting each other and allowing each other to be their own person with their own likes and dislikes.
  • Caring means making each other a priority, working as a team, and doing what’s best for the team, even if it requires some compromise and self-sacrifice.
  • Building a shared life or solving shared problems is team effort, not a competition with each other. There is no “winning” unless it’s a shared victory. Otherwise, everyone loses.

It’s not exactly a spell, but the children’s mission is based around learning to function as a couple and to control their tempers and personal behavior. Magical things do start to happen when they learn to consider others’ feelings and not just their own.

There does seem to be some magic in the story. Robin later explains to Maria that the reason why nobody else could see him playing with her in London when they were younger is because he was always in or around Silverydew or Moonacre. He says that he traveled to London to play with her when he was asleep, so he wasn’t physically there. It’s like a form of astral projection or out-of-body experience. Also, like Sir Benjamin’s “dog” turns out to be a lion, the “little white horse” turns out to be a unicorn.

I couldn’t help but notice that all of the known Moon Princesses since the first one and the men that they seem to love before before they quarrel with them seem to be cousins of each other. Loveday Minette and Sir Benjamin were cousins of each other because their fathers were brothers, and Maria and Robin are more distant cousins of each other because their grandfathers were brothers. The idea of marrying a cousin or even loving them romantically seems odd for modern times, but that did happen in noble families in the past, so it might not seem so odd for the characters and others in the story.

This book also taught me what a mangel-wurzel is. They just mention it in passing, like readers should know what it is. It has such a strange name that I had to look it up. It’s a kind of beet, and apparently, it has also been used to make “punkies” or jack o’lanterns in areas where people didn’t grow turnips, before people adopted pumpkins for the purpose. Just an odd bit of trivia.