Walking to Mercury
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
In The Fifth Sacred Thing, readers fell in love with Maya Greenwood, the 98-year-old writer who led Northern California's successful 21st century rebellion against a racist, totalitarian regime of the South. Walking to Mercury takes readers back to the 20th century and powerfully dramatizes the forces that shaped this extraordinary woman.The book opens and closes with the middle-aged Maya struggling with a profound personal and spiritual crisis. The culminating factor has been her mother's death, and now Maya embarks on a trek in the Himalayas, intending to sprinkle her mother's ashes at the base of Mt. Everest and finally lay to rest her tumultuous past. At rest stops in tiny Tibetan villages, she reads diary pages her lover Johanna has tucked into her bag—the diary Johanna kept throughout their shared youth during the Vietnam era.In vivid flashbacks to those radical days, we accompany the young Maya as she awakens to the summer of love, joins the anti-war movement, and enters into a relationship with the abusive, alcoholic Rio. She finally gathers the strength to break free and seek her own true path, which takes her from the streets of Manhattan to the mountains of Mexico. Eventually she emerges, stronger and wiser, infused with the wisdom of the earth and the spirit of the goddess. Traveling through the landscape of memories helps Maya reclaim her past and foreshadows the miraculous events readers of The Fifth Sacred Thing know her to be capable of in the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Earnest and too long, Starhawk's prequel to The Fifth Sacred Thing tells the story of 38-year-old Maya Greenwood's pilgrimage to Nepal. Maya literally carries her personal baggage in her backpack, which contains her dead mother's ashes, as well as letters and journal entries from past and present lovers. Most of the novel is devoted to Maya's account of her life so far, and the key emotional, spiritual and political impressions and awakenings that will open her up to become a great ecofeminist leader in the next century. Having dropped out of high school after being disciplined for indulging in LSD and making out with her best girlfriend, Johanna Weaver, Maya falls in love with an impulsive alcoholic and helps build People's Park in San Francisco. Years later, she becomes a well-known writer and teacher of ritual and magic workshops, but when her mother dies of cancer, Maya begins to question her "open, bisexual, long-running affair" with Johanna and her relationship to nature. There are few surprises in this novel. All the loose ends are tied up, predictably enough at a political demonstration at a nuclear test site in Nevada. A natural writer, Starhawk unapologetically aims her story at an audience of converts who will immediately sympathize when Maya likens a bout of shyness to "the time I met Alice Walker at the homeless benefit and couldn't bring myself to say anything." Maya's sincerity and sweet-natured intensity may be enough to carry the story for the uninitiated, but, ultimately, Maya's touchstones seem like a pile of cliches and banalities. Starhawk's legion of admirers, however, should find this an affirming tale. Author tour.
