I can’t count the number of times I’ve read Nicolas Stuart Gray’s Mainly in Moonlight. I know that I took it out of the North York Public Library Children’s Section so many times the librarians must have wondered why my parents didn’t just buy me a copy. (Actually, I’m not sure why either. My father worked in publishing until I was in my mid-teens and we were always surrounded by books, but for some reason it never dawned on me to ask them to get this one for me. I later bought my own copy at a used book store).
It was probably my first experience with a talented writer taking all the conventions of well-known fairy tales and playing with them with subversive glee. If it was, then the experience “took”, as this is still something I love. In this collection of short stories, you’ll find wit, beautiful prose, sorrow, feminist heroines (before I knew there was such a thing and that it would matter to me so much), love, magic, cats, sorcerers, goats, demons and more. Find a child you love to give it to – or to read it aloud to. Or, oh hell, just buy it for yourself.