Moon-Spinners

After reading Nine Coaches Waiting I went looking for more books by Mary Stewart, and this one somehow caught my attention first. The Moonspinners is awesome, one of Stewart's best. Nicola is a young woman on holiday from her job at the Embassy in Greece, who agrees to meet up with an older friend on Crete. She arrives before her friend, and goes exploring in the mountains above the village where she will be staying. There she finds Mark, who has been wounded by a gunshot, and his Greek friend Lambis, and ends up tending to Mark for a night while Lambis goes back to their boat. Nicola finds out that Mark's brother Colin was kidnapped by Cretan men after they witnessed the possible murder of a Greek man, and Mark himself was wounded and presumed dead by the kidnappers/murderers. Nicola goes down to the village and meets up with her friend Frances, but can't seem to stop thinking about Mark and his brother, and does some sleuthing of her own, though she promised Mark she'd stay out of it. I think what I love most about this book is how subtly the romance between Mark and Nicola develops--they're only together for about twenty or thirty pages of the entire book, but their interest in each other is very believable and not contrived or forced for the sake of the story.

Who can resist the spell that Mary Stewart weaves in one of her best novels? Not a soul. Technically, 'The Moonspinners' has all the right ingredients, beginning with a fantastically deceptive setting--the untamed Cretan countryside, described to perfection with its whirling white-sailed windmills, its craggy landscape peppered with enough fragrant wildflowers to fill Dioscorides' Greek Herbal and its people, proud, fiercely patriotic, bravely bearing the scars of war and the miseries of a sparse existence. The protagonists are charmingly intrepid, managing to keep their British stiff upper lips intact even in the face of a wildly unstable group of gun-happy thugs-turned kidnappers. Our narrator is a deliciously innocent, well-meaning and attractive vacationer, Nicola Ferris, (think Elizabeth Shue in 'The Saint' not perky Hayley Mills who in the movie of the same name was a burgeoning adolescent--this Nicola is a consummate situation-manager on a mission, accustomed to controlling her life and the people around her)who in refusing to back out of an affair she unwittingly steps into, discovers the one situation she cannot manage without help. It takes the handsome stranger, in the guise of competent English tourist Mark Langley (and yes, a young Peter McEnery will do quite,) to turn the tables on her while pressing her into a less dominant role that she finds she actually likes. Mark's teenaged brother, the kidnapped Colin and his clever forays into the stranger world of British slang, provides an effective comedic foil for the straight-laced Mark and his Greek counterpart, the English-idiom-challenged caique-owner, Lambis. The insiduous-pallikarathes villan, Stratos, one part charm to two parts unstable lethal weapon, the slithering eel-like Tony, and sadly-complaisant, hard-working Sofia, round up the players along with Nicola's older but wiser cousin, Frances. Don't miss this one--the prose alone will have you chucking your stalward life and buying a Greek wildflower guide along with a one-way ticket to Crete just to stand in the presence of those languidly spinning windmills!

While the Disney film 'The Moon-Spinners' starring Hayley Mills is a fab movie, it doesn't do this book justice. If you're a viewer of the film and think you know the plot: think again. The plot and characters are *much* different than the film version; enough that I think of film and book as two entirely different entities.I currently have three copies of this book on my shelf: one from ebay, one that I ordered from the UK when it was only there I could find it in print, and the most recent US printing. It's a book that I've read many times and hate to see end each time.

I loved this book as a teen-ager and I have begun re-reading all of them again 40 yrs later and they still are as good as I remember. Why have they not been all re-issued??? This is a wonderful story. I urge young readers to give her a try.