Customer Reviews

Moonspinners

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(0)
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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!

I, too, was amazed to discover how different the book was from the screen adaptation. As much as I enjoyed the movie, the novel is on another level entirely. After reading it, I would suggest that the movie should bear the sub-title "Roughly suggested by Mary Stewart's novel of the same name".

Nicola may have her moments of weakness, but unlike many other Stewart heroines who seem to go around in a bit of a fog to keep the suspense level higher, she does the best she can mentally with the information at her disposal. Her actions and reactions were uniformly true to her established character, and her courage was both admirable and somehow believeable.

The suspense builds steadily right up to the end with no let-down, and unless your satisfaction depends on a heroine who also qualifies as a kind of samauri-warrior, I don't think you'll be disappointed in Nicola's personal involvement in the climactic sequence. (Compare her end-role with that of the heroine in Ms. Stewart's next novel "This Rough Magic" - which bears a striking similarity to "The Moonspinners" - and I think you'll see what I mean.)

Personally, I rate the mystery and suspense books I read on a scale from one to ten, and "The Moonspinners" is one of only three that has gotten a 10 from me.

Any time you pick up a book by Mary Stewart you are guaranteed a well written and well researched story with interesting characters and stunning settings. Moonspinners is set in Greece, and you do feel as though you are almost there with the main characters of the story. Nicola Ferris is a secretary at the British Embassy in Athens and she takes off for some R & R on Crete, little knowing that her vacation will bring adventure and danger and of course romance. My only quibble with this book, as well as with other Mary Stewart romance/mysteries is that the heroine tends to depend on her male friend a little too often and also gets rather weepy on occasion. The fact that almost all the characters smoke contantly also dates the story a bit. But all in all its a good book and the perfect companion for holiday reading.

Who can resist the spell that Mary Stewart weaves in one of her best novels?
No one.
Technically, it 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, (don't think perky Hayley Mills who in the movie of the same name was a burgeoning adolescent--this Nicola is a consummate situation-manager with 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 (yes, a young Peter McEnery might come to mind,) 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 Englishly-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!

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.

...on the darkest night, the maidens take their spindles down to the sea, to wash their wool. And the wool slips from the spindles into the water, and unravels in long ripples of light from the shore to the horizon, and there is the moon again, rising above the sea....Only when all the wool is washed, and wound again into a white ball in the sky, can the moon-spinners start their work once more...."

Can this woman write or what? Nicola Ferris takes a vacation from her job at the British Embassy in Athens and plans on meeting her cousin Frances in a small village on the island of Crete. Arriving a day early, she decides to traipse through the White Mountains and in true Stewart fashion soon finds herself in the thick of danger, mystery and of course a hero in need of feminine assistance. Mark Langley and his younger brother Colin had been attacked after witnessing a crime, Mark was wounded and they assume Colin is murdered or been taken hostage. Nicola spends a night tending to Mark as Lambis goes for supplies and she is then forcefully sent on her way to forget what she's seen and continue her holiday. But of course it's not quite as simple as that and once settled into her hotel she recognizes Mark's attackers from the description he gave her and the adventure begins.

And that's all I'm going to tell. What follows is a darn-near unputdownable tale of mystery, cat-and-mouse intrigues and unexpected plot turns all leading up to one incredible nail-biting finish (I must get hold of the film now). I really enjoyed Nicola and Mark, they had just the right spark and spunkiness to play off of each other and add a perfect light-heartedness to the story (lol, his comments at the end when she had to wear his brother's slightly too tight pants), and I loved the way she can set up her scenes - everything on the island literally came alive for me from the tiniest flower, to the windmills, the mountains as well as those treacherous rocks alongside the bay. Don't miss this one.

The Moon Spinners is definitely one of Mary Stewart's best. It was the first book of hers I had read and it led me to search for and purchase all of her writings. The stories are suspenseful, there is always a hint of romance, and the ending is not always obvious (a problem in some so called mysteries). There is also a movie version of The Moon Spinners, but do not read the book first if you want to enjoy it - it changes too much of the story. Reading The Moon Spinners will induct you into the Mary Stewart fan club. This and Touch Not the Cat are definitely her finest.

Mary Stewart is a brilliant author. I've read the Moonspinners several times, and I'm always hooked from the very first line: "It was the egret, flying out of the lemon-grove, that started it."

Sparks of romance light the way through this unique mystery filled with danger and delight. Swept along with Nicola and Mark--as they risk their lives in the exotic White Mountains of Crete--this story is fresh for me every time!