Sun and Moon

by Naomi Mitchison

Recounts the adventures of Sun and Moon, the twin children of Cleopatra and Mark Antony.

80 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1970

About the author

Naomi Mitchison, author of over 70 books, died in 1999 at the age of 101. She was born in and lived in Scotland and traveled widely throughout the world. In the 1960s she was adopted as adviser and mother of the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana. Her books include historical fiction, science fiction, poetry, autobiography, and nonfiction, the most popular of which are The Corn King and the Spring Queen, The Conquered, and Memoirs of a Spacewoman.

Mitchison lived in Kintyre for many years and was an active small farmer. She served on Argyll County Council and was a member of the Highlands and Islands Advisory Panel from 1947 to 1965, and the Highlands and Islands Advisory Consultative Council from 1966 to 1974.

Praise for Naomi Mitchison:

"No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison."
-- The Observer

"Mitchison breathes life into such perennial themes as courage, forgiveness, the search for meaning, and self-sacrifice."
-- Publishers Weekly

"She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which ... comes by grace."
-- Times Literary Supplement

"One of the great subversive thinkers and peaceable transgressors of the twentieth century.... We are just catching up to this wise, complex, lucid mind that has for ninety-seven years been a generation or two ahead of her time."
-- Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts

"Her descriptions of ritual and magic are superb; no less lovely are her accounts of simple, natural things -- water-crowfoot flowers, marigolds, and bright-spotted fish. To read her is like looking down into deep warm water, through which the smallest pebble and the most radiant weed shine and are seen most clearly; for her writing is very intimate, almost as a diary, or an autobiography is intimate, and yet it is free from all pose, all straining after effect; she is telling a story so that all may understand, yet it has the still profundity of a nursery rhyme.
-- Hugh Gordon Proteus, New Statesman and Nation

Reviews

[Ange · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sun and Moon is a short chapter book about the twin children of Cleopatra and Mark Antony. Sun (Alexander Helios) and Moon (Cleopatra Selene) live in luxury in their palace, but both harbour a desire to see the lighthouse at Alexandria. For memorising his lines of Homer, Sun is rewarded with a visit to the lighthouse, but Moon is not allowed to go. Full of disappointment and anger, Moon takes the cloak and milk pot of a humble kitchen girl and makes her own way to the lighthouse on foot. Both the children are fascinated with the workings of the lighthouse and how the great fire at its apex is lit. But, for disobeying her nurse, Moon has to face the possible wrath of her mother, Queen Cleopatra. This was quite a charming, if somewhat stilted read. It has lovely illustrations and would probably be of interest to any child interested in ancient history.

[Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides]

I didn't pay terribly close attention to the catalogue entry for this book. I was expecting a fairy tale type story, but it turned out to be a children's story about Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, the twin children of the most famous queen named Cleopatra and Marcus Antonius.