Seeking a collection of magical, short stories for children illustrated with grayscale sketches. I believe it was one author. The edition I read in the earlier 2000s was older, maybe 60s or 70s, and had black and white sketches for each story. The stories I remember include one of an acrobat who had never touched the ground since the day they were born, and it ends sadly when their lover is hurt and they fall from the sky?; a magician who had different colored window panes in each room of his house, and to the children who visited each window looked out to a different world, a yellow desert, a green jungle, a blue Atlantis; and two sisters whose parents each separately made deals with the sun and the moon so the babies would live – when the girls were grown they were light and dark, life and death. The light girl was always singing and keeping the parents happy, but the dark girl never sang until the parents were tired of the light girl’s songs – then the dark girl sang her only song, a song of eternal rest. Mostly what I remember from the book was how mystical and melancholic it felt.
Stump the Bookseller
New format, same book stumper solving.
I know one of these stories – Margaret Mahy’s ‘The House of Coloured Windows’, which was in a favourite storybook that I had as a child. The rest I don’t recognise, but I searched the Internet Speculative Fiction Database to see which other compilations the story has appeared in, and it suggested Mahy’s ‘The Door in the Air and Other Stories’ (1988), which looks like a match.
THAT IS THE EXACT BOOK. THANK YOU SO MUCH. I searched that collection and it had the exact cover I remember! Oh I’m so excited to buy it and reread!
My pleasure. You’ve made me eager to read the rest of the collection for the first time, too!
THAT IS THE EXACT BOOK. THANK YOU SO MUCH. I searched that collection and it had the exact cover I remember!