"It was Old Bess, the Wise Woman of the village, who first suspected that the baby at her daughter's house was a changeling . . . " She realized that "some midwinter night the human child she had helped to birth had been snatched away to some hidden, heathen, elfish place, and this alien creature had been left at the blacksmith's house instead."
Old Bess knows how to cause the switch back again: "The changeling will be gone in a blink, so they say, if it is only made to tell its age. For it may be no babe at all, but oldern old."When the child's mother, Anwara, tries to accept the strange baby, who is so unlike any other in the village, the child, Saaski, thinks about her homeland of the Folk and numberless kin.
She did come from the Folk, trained in their ways, learning to avoid farmers but lacking the capabilities to really disappear as she was supposed to do. For this reason, the Prince of the Folk exchanged her for a real baby. Anwara's baby.,
Saaski discovers that she is a "misbegotten," half-human, half-Folk - her father a fisherman who had strayed into Folk country. In the village she is supposed to forget her Folk home, but she begins to read runes and other signs of her past. Because she looks and acts different from the other village children, she is heckled and taunted. All the calamities in the town are blamed on her - the curdling milk and the pox that appears to take its toll on the children. She is accused of using witchcraft.
When she finds a set of bagpipes and plays instinctively the music of the Folk, as is sometimes heard from across the moor, suspicions are grounded in hate and vengeance. The villagers tell her parents that she must be disposed of or they will burn her - as is tradition for witches - at the Midwinter Festival.
With the help of goatherd Tam, Saaski develops a plan to steal back the human baby from the Folk, return it to its parents and make a life for herself outside of the village.
Eloise McGraw is a master storyteller. Using an imaginative dialect in a fully developed setting, the author has deftly drawn the reader into the world of Folk and village. The characters of Saaski, her "mum," "da" and Old Bess are enlarged to the limit by action, dialogue and description. These four are well-grounded and serve as focus for the other characters, who fill in the shadows and edges of fantasy.
Some very tender spots in "The Moorchild" bring lumps to the throat, such as when Saaski is mistreated and when she inquires about the feelings of love and hate: "You want to hurt somebody a-purpose, or plan out somethin' wicked that'll make 'em sorry." She simply cannot understand hatred until she sees it in the faces and actions of her accusers.
"Likely she didn't understand about love, either. It was just one of the ways she was different from everyone else."
"The Moorchild" is a virtual encyclopedia of herbal medicines - buckbean, St. John's wort, bearberry and moss and all the elements that promote natural healing.
The book also offers a sampling of the village and elfish traditions, rituals and music, particularly the celebration of Midsummer's Eve, which is a pagan holiday preceding our own Halloween.
"The Moorchild" received a Newbery Honor recently.
McGraw was also awarded a Newbery Honor award for "Tangled Webb." Her other novels of traditions and folkways, "The Seventeenth Swap," "The Trouble With Jacob" and "The Striped Ships," are of equal quality.