From: Kathleen Horning <horning>
Date: Tue, 01 Aug 1995 17:16:00 -600

Thanks to Nina for getting us off to a good start in our August discussion of "The Haunting" and "The Changeover" by Margaret Mahy.

I am reluctant to leave our discussion of "Walk Two Moons" because it's been so interesting to read all of your comments, and to hear from the book's author, Sharon Creech, herself! Please do feel free to continue commenting on and asking questions about WTM. And I would like to thank Sharon for being so generous with her time while she's on vacation. Her latest comments about the new moon/baby footprints make me want to go back and read the book all over again.

On the subject of the two Mahy books, I was interested to read what Nina wrote about both books' use of magic as a metaphor of maturity. I also appreciated how in both of these books the supernatural occurrences mirror the realities of the protagonist's family life: eg. Barney is being "haunted" by his dead mother whom he has never known and Laura's "change over" reflects her transfer of allegiances from her absent father to her mother's new boyfriend, Chris Holly.

There is a lot of interplay between fantasy and reality in both books, just, for example, in the way Mahy describes such ordinary things as stoplights ("casting quick spells of prohibition and release") earth-moving machines ("giant prehistoric monsters making an island of Silurian time in 20th century streets").
  I'm anxious to read what others have to say about the two books. Are there other things you notice they have in common?
Received on Tue 01 Aug 1995 06:16:00 PM CDT