The Garden Behind the Moon

The Garden Behind the Moon by Howard Pyle

Read: 5/14/10

LibraryThing tags, if I had put this on LibraryThing: Children's, Fantasy, Fairy Tale, Victorian

I tag it as a fairy tale not because it's a traditional one, but because it has all the elements.

This is a more charming and less adventurous book than Howard Pyle's usual fare, I believe. Not that there isn't any adventure; it's just not The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. It's a little reminiscent of George MacDonald -- Pyle was born only about thirty years after MacDonald, and it looks like he started writing (or publishing) about thirty years after MacDonald did, too. So roughly the same period, and "one of the late nineteenth-century writers who helped invent the fairy tale novel," as Jane Yolen put it (quoted on the back cover of my library copy), so it's not particularly surprising one would remind me of the other. Yay!

Now let's see if I can remember all the adjectives I was thinking of when I first finished the book. Hmm. Charming, I already mentioned that one. Beautiful, sad, and oh bother, one I could remember just yesterday, gaaah... I think it basically meant beautiful and sad (but not tragic!) at the same time, but still, the connotation is so much better than if you just use the two words... it started with an "m"... gaah. Delightful. No, it's not the word I'm looking for, but I think it was still one of the original adjectives. Sort of picturesque... Ah well. Someday I'm going to buy this book, a nice edition with all the original illustrations.

From the Foreword: "When you look out across the water at night, after the sun has set and the moon has risen high enough to become bright, then you see a long, glimmering moon-path reaching away into the distance. There it lies, stretching from the moon to the earth, and from the earth to the moon, as bright as silver and gold, and as straight and smooth as a turnpike road...

It looks like a path, and that is what it really is, for if you only know how to do so, you may walk upon it just as easily as you may walk upon a barn floor. All you need to do is to make a beginning, and there you are. After that it is smooth enough walking, and you may skip and play and romp as you choose. Then you may come and go whenever you have a mind to, and if you will take my word for it, it is the most beautiful and wonderful road that a body can travel betwixt here and the land that so few folk ever go to and come back again.

For the moon-path leads straight to the moon. That was why it was built -- that a body might go from the brown earth to the moon, and maybe back again.

But why, you may ask, should anybody want to go to the moon? That I will tell you. The reason is that behind the moon there lies the most wonderful, beautiful, never-to-be-forgotten garden that the mind can think of. In it live little children who play and romp, and laugh and sing, and are as merry and happy as the little white lambs in the green meadow in springtime. There they never have trouble and worry; they never dispute nor quarrel; they never are sorry and never cry.

Aye, aye; -- that beautiful garden. One time I myself saw it -- though in a dream -- dim and indistinct, as one might see such a beautiful place through a piece of crooked glass. In it was the little boy whom I loved the best of all. He did not see me, but I saw him, and I think I was looking into the garden out of one of the moon-windows. I was glad to see him, for he had gone out along the moon-path, and he had not come back again."

And from the end of the book (but without any spoilers, don't worry!): "Well, you may smile at this story if you choose, and call it all moonshine, but if you do not believe by this time that there is more in moonshine than the glimmer and the whiteness, why, I could not make you believe it if I were to write a hundred and twenty-seven great books instead of this short story."

The Little Lame Prince

The Little Lame Prince by Dinah Mulock Craik, illustrated by Hope Dunlap
Read: 5/17/09-5/20/09
LibraryThing tags: Fairy Tale, Fantasy, Children's, Victorian

Cute story. You should read it. Mmm. 103 pages of original fairy taleness... It probably would have been even better if I had read it when I was a little kid, but that cannot be helped.

Crown and Jewel

Crown and Jewel (Bracken #2) by Jeri Massi
Read: 5/9/06

I was delighted to find that there were sequels to a treasured childhood favorite of mine, The Bridge by Jeri Massi, which I've reviewed before. This is the second in the trilogy. Apparently they were put out by Bob Jones University Press, which explains why they're pretty much unknown except to homeschoolers. As I recall though, they aren't overtly Christian, just moral. I think she wrote some other really good books I read as a child, too... I should find those and read them again.

The publisher’s note says Jeri Massi wrote the trilogy imitating the genre of “wise woman” stories, “popular for combining high adventure with good moral lessons for children.” This is the sort of statement that seems almost intended to make me lose my appetite for reading! Moral lessons are good and all, but often people who write stories for the purpose of imparting moral lessons aren’t very good writers, and the stories are sappy. Jeri Massi, however, is a better storyteller than that. I love these books, in spite of themselves! Yes, they do tend towards the more allegorical side of the scale, but they are good allegory, like Tales of the Kingdom (and less allegorical than that).

As Tolkien said in his Letters, “Allegory and Story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth. So that the only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory. And one finds, even in imperfect human ‘literature’, that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily can it be read ‘just as a story’; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it.”

And as for telling a story to teach children better morals, fortunately Jeri Massi seems to understand that children need to be taught things a little more deep than just “obey your parents” and “share your toys.” A fantasy setting always helps with this sort of thing. It’s very conducive to modeling noble and beautiful living, to showing things how they Are.

So what is this sequel actually about? Uh... I don't know! Didn't you see that I read it two years ago?! =) Most of the above I originally wrote down about the third one, soon after reading it. It applied, and was needful for posting about this one first. Nah, I do know some things, though. Crown and Jewel is about Princess Rosewyn, daughter of Rosalynn, who was the main character in The Bridge. She's more of a tomboy than her mother, and she has her own adventures saving the kingdom of Bracken with the wise woman. Yep. There you go.


“Now she understood why her mother always spoke of her with such reverence, as of a great queen. Still, it was hard to feel comfortable or safe with her, yet. Rosewyn realized that her mother’s word was not enough to build love in her own heart. That was up to the woman herself.”

The “wise woman” archetype is often analogous to God in allegory... since this is story as well, she's mortal and everything, but her relationships with others often say things about God and His with His children.


“‘We go now into great darkness,’ the woman said. ‘But there is light at the end. Have no fear.’”