[Under a Changing Moon is] the story of a bourgeois family in the Rhineland in 1865. The family is large and respectable—ruled over by a benign father who is the local magistrate, and a busy wife who, with the help of her daughter Paula, just out of convent, manages to keep her many sons in order. The whole novel is the record of a year's domestic minutiae, quite elegantly written, but with an attitude so coy that I can only assume it was intended for a certain kind of child. Most kids wouldn't be convinced. People like this may have lived a hundred years ago, but that's not the point. Maybe I have misread the book—indeed, I hope I have. (p. 214)

[In Under a Changing Moon] Mrs. Benary proves that it is still possible to write movingly and to a certain extent sentimentally about a young girl's emergence from adolescence into womanhood without suggesting the word "sex" anywhere along the line. Her heroine, Paula, returns to the bosom of her very large family in the provincial town of Limburg, from her convent schooling, in the year 1886. She falls in love, and is fallen in love with, but all does not come right at once, as is proper in a story and usually in life also. But her own story is given a background and an emphasis by the actions of her mother, father, brothers, uncles, aunts and family servants…. Though Mrs. Benary does not labour the facts, all her young characters have problems of one sort or another to solve, crises of character which must be faced alone, and which must be overcome for the sake of future development and personal integrity. The whole is tempered with the kind of humour which comes of a mind at peace if not at rest. This is just the right kind of book for the adolescent and the pre-adolescent who needs some reassurance about moral values and integrated behaviour. (p. 303)

The Junior Bookshelf, October, 1965.

The older girl who enjoys a quiet, slow-moving narrative will return to [Under a Changing Moon] time and again, and still find it richly rewarding. Its accounts of the progression of the seasons and the Church's year, of family relationships, and life in a provincial German town are evocative and moving. But the author is also to be commended for the way she handles moral issues soberly and without embarrassment; few children's writers nowadays can do this. (p. 1145)

The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London), 1965; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), December 9, 1965.