Date: Mon, 20 May 2002 20:58:59 -0500
Subject: Re: (urth) Moonwalk
From: Adam Stephanides 

on 5/12/02 5:45 PM, Alice K. Turner at aturner6@nyc.rr.com wrote:

> When I was about 11, I read a Victorian children's novel
> in which a young boy looking out at the sea under a full moon, was able to
> jump from bar to bar on the light reflected on the swell of the waves to
> reach another land (Heaven, I would presume, though I don't recall). Part of
> that passel of Kingsley/MacDonald sentimental type of Christian fantasy. For
> many years, decades, I misremembered this book as -At the Back of the North
> Wind- by MacDonald. But it isn't; I reread that recently and it's entirely
> different. But the image is very potent to me--the path laid down by the
> moon. Does this ring a bell with any of you? Please e-mail if so. I would
> like to get a copy of that
> book to read again.

THE GARDEN BEHIND THE MOON, by Howard Pyle.  A peculiar book: the titular
garden behind the moon is not heaven, but a place where the souls of
"simple" children play temporarily.  Its subtitle is "A Real Story of the
Moon Angel," who is a sympathetic Death figure (nearly a century before
either Gaiman or Pratchett).  It is sentimental, and not well written, but
not specifically Christian that I could tell; in fact, it contains a version
of the story of the Fall in which, as with Pullman, the Fall is presented as
a good thing (though without the specifically anti-Christian coloration that
Pullman gives it).

(I've both emailed this to Alice and posted it to the list, since others may
have found her description interesting.)

--Adam


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