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 . . .
"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 with all its possible meanings . . . . Moonwise is a work of inexhaustible richness."
— Encyclopedia of Fantasy
"Greer Gilman is a writer like no one else. Many try to employ the matter of myth and folktale, but their tongues are inadequate — Gilman can employ words as the bards of Ireland did, to make realities, and she does it handily, and over and over. Moonwise doesn't resemble a work of the past age — it is the past age come back new, in its clothes and its language and its dark riddling heart. Moonwise simply has no peers."
— John Crowley
"Moonwise is an amazing book, a work of genius. It deserves to stand beside Lud-in-the-Mist or the writings of Lord Dunsany as a truly original seminal classic. And yet the most remarkable thing about it is that, amidst its intense and serious magic and its astonishing use of words, it causes you to laugh aloud — quite suddenly, taken unawares by an outrageous pun or an ingenious one-liner. I love this book and admire its nature magic more every time I read it."
— Diana Wynne Jones
"There are some books that seem to have existed forever. That when you find them for the first time you are only rediscovering something you had lost, long ago. Hope Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist is one of these; David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus is a second; Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is another. Green Ilene Gilman's Moonwise is one of that company. It does not take you to where the dreams start. It is where the dreams start."
— John Clute