Moonwise

By Greer Gilman

Book Overview

Greer Gilman's first novel, Moonwise was originally published in 1991. It won the Crawford Award, was shortlisted for the Tiptree and Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards. In 2006 it was reissued by Wildside Press.Ariane came to visit Sylvie at midwinter, hoping to rekindle the old magic of their girlhood game: the Nine Worlds, a fantastical universe founded in a handful of marbles and a tarot of cards, whose myths and kingdoms the two friends had chronicled between them. But when Sylvie disappeared in a moonlit wood, Ariane followed her - not into the familiar ground of their fantasy, but into the thorns and winter of a Cloud they had never invented, a world where ballads were constellations and the moon hunted souls by night... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0451450949
• ISBN13: 9780451450944
• Release Date: February 1991
• Publisher: Roc
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.47 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 4.2" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

Beautiful, poetic, and challenging

If you are looking for light fantasy, a quick escape from the world, this book is not for you. If you love poetry and language, puzzles and riddles, myth and folklore, Moonwise will delight you, if you are willing to take on a challenge. Be warned, Greer Gilman paints -- beautifully -- with old English and dialect, words so fallen out of use that you will only find them in the OED, not Webster's. She weaves meaning with...

Some Other Perspectives

No doubt one man's cloud is another man's clod, but that Publisher's Weekly view seems particularly misleading and tonedeaf to "Moonwise." (...) Look at some other evaluations of the book: "Moonwise remarkably attempts to compose an entire long fantasy at a pitch and density of language reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins . . . . GIG's deep knowledge of English etymology (including dialectal variations) charges every word...

Moonwise : Like the Wake

Greer Ilene Gilman is one of the most significant writers in the world today and I hope she gives us something new to follow up to or surpass her wonderful classic "Moonwise". We do not go to "Moonwise" for plot. We go to it for an experience of language that makes us feel as if the roots of psychic and telluric realities have been laid bare. The book can only be compared to James Joyce's astonishing "Finnegans Wake" but unlike...

It's all in how you read it

I read over the other reviews and have a secret to share with you about this book. It's a book that should be read out loud. The poetry, the rhythms of this book are wonderful. And what emerges is something quite different from when you read it silently to yourself.

This book is my Book of Shadows

Moonwise grabbed me the first time I read it 7 years ago. I read it probably half a dozen times in the first year and have not missed a year since. One reason I kept re-reading it was to try to understand it, and I understand more each time. It feels at once utterly foreign and deeply, personally familiar. The visual imagery is vivid and dreamlike. If I don't read it at least once each year (starting just before Winter...