Waking the Moon

by Elizabeth Hand

Like all new students, Sweeney moves with caution at Washington, D.C.'s University of the Archangel and St. John the Divine. It is a strange place of brooding shrines and gleaming towers, guarded by stone angels. For Sweeney, college is a time to experiment with sex, to explore new friendships. It is a time of freedom and discovery--until she makes the wrong discovery.

Genres: Fantasy, Horror, Fiction, Dark Academia, Urban Fantasy, Mystery, Gothic

497 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

A New York Times notable and multiple award– winning author, Elizabeth Hand has written seven novels, including the cult classic Waking the Moon, and short-story collections. She is a longtime contributor to numerous publications, including the Washington Post Book World and the Village Voice Literary Supplement. She and her two children divide their time between the coast of Maine and North London.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

During her first week as a student at The University of the Archangels and St. John The Divine, Sweeney Cassady becomes friends with Angela and Oliver, a pair of charismatic and beautiful young people who have been chosen for great things by the Goddess, and soon her destiny reveals itself to be mysteriously bound up with theirs. Opposing the Great Mother is an ancient brotherhood of mages known as the Benandanti, who have watched throughout the centuries for signs of a new advent of the ancient Goddess, and at last the signs have appeared. Soon the battle begins, and Sweeney remains at the heart of the conflict for decades.

"Waking the Moon" (1994) is a fantasy/horror tale inspired by the reemergence of The Goddess in the late 20th Century: first in the 60's and '70's as a source of energy and an object of worship, and later--unfortunately--in the '80's and '90's as a pop icon and a self-help exemplar. What each of these cultural enthusiasms failed to recall--and what Camille Paglia, for one, helped us remember--is that the Goddess has always been linked to chaos and destruction. It is not only her male consorts who are in danger (Adonis, Actaeon, Attis) but also the world in general, and civilization in particular.

Don't worry, though, this is no anti-feminist screed, but an artfully crafted novel by a woman who knows not only her myths but also the darkness that those myths may release within us.

The last third of the book surprised me, but it also pleased me, particularly the conclusion. Consider the story of Attis and Cebele: this ending strikes exactly the right note.

[Niharika · Rating 1 out of 5]

You must have heard about how reading books and buying books are kinda sorta two different hobbies? Well, what if I tell you there's a secret third thing, one that is a little less capitalist in its approach? Well, I like adding random strange books to my tbr list, the obscurer the book, the better.

I came across this post by someone on instagram, substack, or twitter… I don't remember where; she was talking about a fantasy book from the 90s that was long since out of print and had been recommended to her by her father-in-law. I've felt overwhelmed by the oversaturation of tropes and caricatures in the contemporary fantasy scene for quite some time now, so I immediately looked it up online, and when I tell you this seemed to be tailor-made for my tastes, I'm not overexaggerating. So I had to pick it up then and there.

"Waking the Moon" begins like most dark academia books out there, Sweeny Cassidy is your regular Plain Jane narrator who somehow finds herself drawn to the elusive rich crowd of her small liberal arts college. Despite her apparent mediocrity, Sweeney quickly becomes a part of a trio that also includes the divinely beautiful couple, Angelica and Oliver. She's kind of in love with both of them, but as it so happens it's totally a lost cause, and there's apparently a secret society dating back to the early mediaeval period, and they practise the occult. Then a lot of shit is stirred, and 20 years pass, and everyone moves on with their lives, but nothing is as it seems, and what do you know, there's an apocalypse looming over your head.

I'm being intentionally vague with this recap because if you do want to pick it up after hearing about it from here, I want you to go in as blindly as I did. And man, I really tried to love this book. But there were way too many factors that didn't quite align with what I wanted from it, and now I feel bad about giving it a mean review.

Here's What I Liked About it

1. The premise looked so good!! We've got a campus setting, messy interpersonal drama between a group of friends with a hint of polyamory, black magic, secret societies, and a goddess-worshipping cult! The list goes on!

2. The writing was quite good at times. Many things pissed me off in this book, but the author surely can write.

3. I liked how well researched this book was, especially with the historical practices of goddess-centric cultures across different continents. My hometown in India gets namedropped several times, as do many of the powerful goddesses from Hindu mythology.

Here's What I Did NOT Like About It

1. Let's just say that this book shows its age. Published in the early 90s, this has a remarkable queer representation, in my opinion, but it felt a little heavy-handed at times. For instance, a pair of sapphic lovers always call each other "girlfriend" while talking to each other, while one of the main characters, who happens to be a lesbian, is often commented on for her lifelong unwarranted devotion to her once roommate in a manner that feels the slightest bit icky.

2. The pacing of this book is way off. A huge chunk of the plot points are covered by the first 30 per cent, and then the story starts to get quite mundane, and the pace never really recovers from that low point. The time jump felt hurried, and the distribution between the two timelines was pretty uneven.

3. There are primarily two groups of secret societies that have been set up as arch-rivals in this book. One is your typical brotherhood driven by Abrahamic patriarchal traditions, and the other is a radical misandrist goddess-worshipping insurgency who wants to bring back the dear old days of cultist pagan rituals and sacrifices. And even though the author goes into very, very deep with the latter, I would've loved to learn more about the Illuminati-like brotherhood too. There was practically zero attention given to the origins and the workings of this brotherhood, which felt like a missed opportunity.

And Now, Stuff I HATED About this Book

1. At its core, this book feels very anti-feminist in its way, which came as a shock to me since this is written by an author who I've learned identifies as a feminist. Essentially, the big bad villain of this book is this cult leader woman who goes around controlling wildlife and sacrificing random men she picks up from the streets, and even her old friends. The author's idea seems to be that a matriarchy is going to bring on unprecedented chaos and massacres, so we must demolish any goddess-worshipping uprising at its root while we still can. And look, I'm as atheist as they come, I do not literally give a shit about partaking in ancient cultist rituals and reviving some dormant Cretan or Minoan Divine Female, but let's not pretend that we're even marginally okay under the current laws of society, because that's a laughable idea. And there's a shift in the author's opinion on the New Age pagan revival halfway through the book that's so abrupt that you might think she got threatened by a men's rights group before writing the climax of this book. Honestly, one minute the author was cheering on the vehement stand taken by one of the protagonists against the perils of patriarchy, and the next minute she was preaching through the main narrator's voice how deeply barbaric and evil the idea of a society not led by men was. I, as you can probably imagine, was not particularly pleased.

2. Continuing with the first point, I also hated how the feminist cult was portrayed to be this brainwashed group of privileged college girls who would rip off their clothes and get butt naked and, like, casually sacrifice an innocent man behind a random jazz bar, all the while chanting ooga booga vaguely Greek-sounding mantras. Time and time again I've seen goddess-worshipping mystic groups being portrayed like this in various men-written media in both English and Bengali, but I didn't expect a female author to perpetuate this idea. It felt reductive and lazy and misogynistic at its core.

3. And finally, it's time to talk about the absolutely nauseating final act of the book, where we see a 38-year-old woman falling in love with the 18-year-old son of her former crush and promptly engaging in a sexual relationship with this teenage boy, and then getting proposed to by said boy, all in the span of a total of 3 days. I wish I was making this up. In the epilogue, we see them pregnant, to top it off with a rotten cherry on the cake.

All in all, while I liked how unique and genuinely wacky this book was from what I'm used to seeing get published in the fantasy genre these days, my reading experience was anything but pleasant. This dragged on forever, and the payoff wasn't even that good.


Thoughts Before Reading

I'm so obsessed with 90s fantasy paperbacks, you guys!!

Oh well, look what happens when I get over-enthusiastic about something.

longer review to come (hopefully).

[Gabrielle (Reading Rampage) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Academic setting, secret occult societies, goddess worship… My question here is: how did teenage me never read that book? She would have lost her mind over it! This was exactly the sort of stuff she was into! It was actually a bit how young me fantasized actual academia would be: sophisticated people who discussed interesting and arcane topics, who had strange little gatherings away from prying eyes that she might one day be invited to… When university turned out to be pedestrian as fuck and when her fellow students turned out to be idiots, she was sorely disappointed. Even more so when there wasn’t even a charismatic professor for her to orbit around. Poor little thing. In fact, I am sure that if I had read this when I was an (archaeology!) undergrad, I would have lost my mind – but reading it at 38, my perspective on it was that this was interesting, but flawed and a bit too dry for my taste.

During her first week as a student at the University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine, Sweeney befriends the glamorous and mysterious Oliver and Angelica. Part of her knows she will never quite mesh with them, that they are from a different world, but she simply can’t stay away. These friendship will lead to a world-shattering revelation: the university, and most of society, is in fact controlled by a secret society known as the Benandanti, who seek to protect human civilization from an ancient threat. When that threat materializes, Sweeney is caught in the middle, and while she is kept safe and away for many years, a string of strange deaths amongst the group she was once so close to will bring an ancient rivalry to an epic show-down.

Many people have compared this book to “The Secret History’ and there are certainly a lot of parallels (though I believe “Waking the Moon” was published first). The neopagan feminist elements were obviously super fashionable at the time (and are making a comeback now, as are lots of 90s things!) and make for an interesting premise. But I’m not sure I would call this a feminist work (or if it is, it is way more extreme than any feminism I would be aligned with), and if I am not mistaken, a lot of the archeological theories discussed in the book have since been debunked.

That can all be fine if you are happy to suspend disbelief, but I think that the bit that really made this a OK book for me (as opposed to a great one) is that I found the characters a bit dry. Sweeney’s passion and desire for both Oliver and Angelica was not something I really felt, and the fact that they are both clearly uninterested in her “that way” means there is zero tension in her relationship with them; it is not at all the love triangle I had expected, and I couldn’t really get why they bothered hanging out with her. It also reminded me of “Call me by your name” in the sense that I absolutely can’t believe in characters that age speaking like that, quoting the classics left right and center – regardless of how illustrious an academic family they ail from. If Hand had taken more time fleshing out those characters and their relationships, and making it all juicier, I think I would have felt much more invested in what happened to them. The ending was interesting, though it felt rushed. And frankly, the relationship between Sweeney and Dylan also felt hastily written, and I had a hard buying it.

In other words, a ton of interesting ideas and concepts that could quite nail the landing for me. I am sure that if I had read this at 17, I would have been totally obsessed with it, though!

[El · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't remember exactly when I stumbled upon this book at the library, but judging from the publication date (1994)... in 1994 I was in high school, and I probably picked this up somewhere close to graduation. I was looking forward to college, so this book appealed to me on that level, and I was messing around with funny things like tarot and runes and moon phases and stuff. I loved everything about this book, from Angelica's peacock blue pen and her scent of sandalwood and oranges, to Oliver's beautiful face and shaggy hair, to Sweeney crouching on her dorm-room window frame like a gargoyle, looking into her room for a different perspective.

There were other aspects that I couldn't make complete sense of, but was beginning to learn at that time - the occult, feminism, cults, anthropology, archaeology, mythology... just for starters. I was a budding all-of-that at the time that I read this book and reading it was just like turning on a light in a dark room because it made complete sense to me. (Okay, I wasn't a budding cult member, but was fascinated by cults.)

So let's say I was about 17 when I read this book. Give or take. Probably a little younger.

I've never completely forgotten about this book, though recently it came to mind while I was reading The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, at which time all I remembered was the name Sweeney and sandalwood and oranges. Knowing a trip to Grandma's was coming up, I found a used paperback copy of this book to take along.

Let's say about 20 years has passed since I first read this book, and I know I flipped through it on more than one occasion after the first reading. So reading it now all the way through again was pretty much like reading it for the first time. Except with 20 year older eyes.

This is a flawed story. The feminism is way more militant than I ever wound up being, but I appreciate the main sentiment that there are significant issues with the patriarchy (I just disagree that a matriarchy is the only other - or best - solution). A college setting is fantastic for that because it's the best place where people first really hear about feminism and (hopefully) begin to learn what it's really about instead of whatever they've learned from the boob tube or from sitting around their family's dinner table.

What happens in the end doesn't really match what the whole first parts were leading up to, and that is a bit of a shame. I think Hand had a wonderful premise going but it was hard to manage it all to bring it to a cohesive (and satisfying) ending. She tried, and I think she did a great job. But I could see how first-time readers as an adult now would think this is all a lot of horseshit.

People talk about the strange story in Donna Tartt's The Secret History, but Hand's story here is even stranger. There are hallucinations (sober ones, at that), angels, demons, references to bestiality, magic, Benandanti. The characters do sort of seem like token 90s characters, like Annie, the lesbian who only wore fatigues and flannel shirts with the arms ripped off (even 20 years after college).

Speaking of - the story starts to sort of lose it's magic (for me) after college. In fact, while the college scenes were so vivid in my memory once I started re-reading, once Sweeney started talking about her life after leaving the university, my interest now sort of waived. Maybe because the Sweeney of 20 years later is roughly the same age I am now, and the mid-30s are described really inaccurately in this book. I'm pretty sure there were references to gray hair, which is just not universal and I felt Hand was trying to say "Hey, guys, once you reach 37, your life is over - no one will look at you, your hair will be gray, you'll be frumpy and gross, you're pathetic, stop breathing."

Of course, Hand was about 36, 37 when she wrote this book, so maybe that's how she felt. That's unfortunate because that's not how I feel about my life right now, and I would hate for vulnerable 16 year olds to read this book (like I did) and think life will be over by the time they leave their 20s. Life is just beginning, kids!

So as a 36-year-old - what did I get out of the book now? Well, my teenage years came back to me in sweeping memories. Like the raging hormones, mostly. This book makes you want to remember that one beautiful person from your past, even though you realize now you didn't really understand that person and your memory of them are just the hormone-driven delusions you had at the time. I mean, what 30-something-year-old doesn't want to have frequent, hot sex with the barely-legal son of a beautiful boy they once had a crush on 20 years ago?

I'm more interested now in the cult aspect of the book, the benandanti. I don't know much about them yet, so cannot comment on any inaccuracies Hand might have included, but I do love trash-talking fraternal societies and similar cult-like groups. If any of you know of any good books about the benandanti, drop me a comment.

This is one of those occasions where I've loved a book so much that I can not properly review it. It just brings up old memories and was sort of comforting to revisit and sort of snort at and chuckle at and nod at and makes me want to run off to be an anthro-archaeologist like I was probably always meant to be. (Except for the part where I hate hot and humid climates.)

So, whatever, take this review for what it is. I wouldn't say I would love this book if I was reading it for the first time right now. As a re-read, I still really enjoyed it because it's smart and fun and not quite Dan Brown (though there are probably similar elements). It's a good time when you're visiting Grandma and want something sort of mindless yet exciting to have on hand. I don't even know if I would recommend this to anyone.

The five stars comes purely out of nostalgia. I thought about knocking it down to a probably more accurate 3- or 4-star rating, but, whatever. YOLO and shit.

[Danica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can tell, even before I've finished typing one sentence into this dialogue box, that this is going to be a very long review. Why? Because I really liked the first two-thirds of this book. Loved it even, for the sensual, pungent writing, the overwrought but undeniably effective atmospherics, the genderbending, the rampant bisexuality of the ensemble cast, the references to UC Berkeley, the evocation of a very specific kind of college-aged lethary & alienation, the violence of feeling that is all but gouged into these pages, the deft incorporation of fantasy elements ... Speaking of fantasy elements. HOW TITILATING DO I FIND THEE. The malignant, black-winged angels. The creepy hallucinations. The brutal bloodbath rituals and the threat of sex edging every exchange and the secret doorways leading to worlds unknown. The gothic mystery of it all! The first third of this book, especially, reads like a perfumed, sweat-saturated medley of plot points taken from Jennifer's Body and Donna Tartt's The Secret History. (I say this understanding that this book predates both of those titles.) The writing was only slightly overripe. There were some deeply felt feminist tirades in this story that made me sit straight up, gripping the book hard, excited to see where they would lead. Man, I was loving it.

So it comes as an enormous disappointment that after 500 pages of scene setting and tension building and feminist chestbeating, Hand leaves us with the ending that she does. Did no one else on Goodreads have MASSIVE FUCKING PROBLEMS with the way Hand (pun alert) handled the resolution to her story? Specifically, Hand seems to allow for the possibility of a multifaceted Goddess in the first half of the book, cf. when Sweeney leaps into Balthazar's portal, which leads into the Goddess's world, refusing to believe that worshipping Othiuym can only result in a future besieged by darkness and evil. BUT THEN, somewhere along the way, it's like Hand threw up her hands at the idea of ever producing a morally ambiguous scenario that somehow mediates a third space between EVIL PATRIARCHY on the one hand AND EVIL MATRIARCHY on the other, so the last third of the book degenerates abruptly into anti-women fear-mongering. Replete, of course, with descriptions of taut long fawn legs and itty bitty waists and boobies overflowerth. What had earlier seemed so empowering and erotic, a celebration of the female body, now seemed (esp. with a particular character's descent into cackling villainy) exploitive and gratuitous.

[*****SPOILERS FOLLOW*****]I mean, it's one thing to write a fantasy novel about a militant feminist cult and have it all end in a totally sensationalized orgy of blood and sex and death where the female uprising has its punishment meted out to it if you're a man; it's another thing to do it if you're a woman. Not to say that either of these hypothetical authors should be excused; but it seems particularly egregious that the writer, here, of this book, is female. It feels like Hand's exploiting some very serious modern day issues for the purpose of telling a sexy, violent story, and then leaving these issues to the wayside without engaging with them in any meaningful way. They form the pivot of her story but are discarded, thoughtlessly, after having served their use (i.e. getting us to the nakedness, the blood-spattered sacrifices, and the requisite happy ending). The fact that women do get beaten, raped, passed over for promotions, consigned to a lifetime of housewife drudgery, subjected to jokes and comments and forms of media meant to police the way they see and use their bodies and brains, is of no significance to Sweeney, or to this narrator.

Another thing that gets me about this book is its perpetuation of the view that women are all tumultuous emotion and primitive mystics and that it's the men, always the men, who are the lightbringers of order and civilization. When in reality, this couldn't be further from the truth. (Ever wonder why when Mohammad Yunus set up Grameen Bank, he made it a strict policy to lend ONLY TO WOMEN? Oh, shit, right, because the women were the ones who paid the bills and fed the children and stocked the pantry and did the bookkeeping and generally kept things in order, while the men did shit like blow all the money on booze. I'm not kidding, I'm pretty sure this has been proven in studies.) Kinda analogous to another totalizing narrative that gets disseminated a lot in today's media, i.e. that of the civilized white man subduing and then reforming the barbaric, brown-skinned savage. HBO's adaption of GoT, I'm looking atchu.

So you know. While I was reading this book, I waved off my usual preoccupations with keenly observed character interiorities, with a certain restraint of language, with blah blah genre conventions. It didn't matter that I had no idea why Sweeney was so special that all the beautiful people fall in love with her! (Seriously, I kept waiting for the revelation that faerie blood ran through her family's veins or something.) It didn't even bother me that much that Hand's scenesetting signature shorthand is to type the words "coriander", "cardomom", "sandalwood", "preserved orange peels", "cinnamon", and "anise" in various endless combinations. It was all just so gothic and sinister and immense and exciting! But oh, the way she wrapped up this book's themes. Or, more specifically, the way she didn't. This was such a good book until the author decided to resort to comfortable black-white binaries in service to her fairytale ending and flip the bird to feminism on the way there. Seriously, ugh.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This had been my favorite book for years. Despite, or maybe because of, the dark adventures our heroine, Sweeney, witnesses and partakes of, this book really spoke to me and reminded me very strongly of my own younger adventures. Also, this book introduced me to C.P. Kavafy, and I'm forever indebted to that. Even sitting here writing this review, some of that magic comes rolling back into me, reminding me of that time of my life. And Oliver, god, Oliver. Haven't read the book in about four years, and yet I'm almost crying just thinking about him.

I really need to read this one again...

[Kat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Waking the Moon is entitled to its 5 stars, if only because Hand introduced me to the melancholic Greek poet C.P Cavafy. Fortunately, this was such a captivating read as well. Partly because I first discovered Waking the Moon when I was living the college life myself, flirting with the occult and occasionally attending goth parties in abandoned churches. The parallels I (thought I) found were the sprinkles on top of this book and its successor Black Light.

Hand masterly crafts a story that often reads as a opium poppy fueled trip and has been compared to The Secret History, due to its rich language, college setting, pagan influences and peculiar characters. In Waking the Moon, eccentric and pretty Oliver comes sit next to our narrator Sweeney Cassidy in class and - mistakenly - befriends her.

Oh, Sweeney knows that she was never supposed to meet an Oliver. Nor a spectacular Angelica, with her scent of sandalwood and oranges. But she accidentally becomes involved with the two, just when a thousands of years old suppressed Pagan goddess chooses Angelica to destroy the world. A patriarchal world which was, up until now, carefully controlled by the Benandanti, an ancient male cult. They are willing to do anything to prevent the goddess from gaining power. But she has a few tricks up her sleeve as well, and planning to sacrifice Oliver is one of them.

I was - and still am - quite impressed by Hand's excellent research on pagan cultures and her ability to blend archaeological discoveries and rituals into a compelling story. Some parts are delicious to read, such as the scene in which Magda discovers the Lunula: a magical blend of thrilling reality and feverish dreams, peppered with lush descriptions of creatures and scents. Sigh.. An all time favorite.

[Jalilah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am partial to coming of age stories involving college students and supernatural/magical professors! For this reason this book reminds me a little of Tam Lin and Memory and Dream
All three books take place in the 70s and start with the protagonist as a university freshman.
I am struck in particular by the similarities with Memory and Dream. Although De Lint's book has a different kind of magic, the fantastic element in both books is somehow inspired by Greek mythology. However the most obvious similarities are both novels start with the leading protagonists as university students experiencing a type of magical experience that is also tied in with friendship that leaves them traumatized and frightened, afraid to live their lives. Then both books fast forward 20 years to have the protagonists encounter the same type of magical occurrence that they fled from. However Waking the Moon is definitely the darkest.
Hand's writing is also very atmospheric. You feel like you are there in the places where the novel is happening.
This is definitely a novel I would re-read. I loved it. The story leaves your head reeling.

[Cathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my second time through Waking the Moon, and it is just such a PLEASURABLE book, lush and spooky and expansive. On first read I expected a horror novel, and was a little disappointed, but taken as a feverishly overwritten dark fantasy, it can't be beat. It reminds me a lot of Neil Gaiman's American Gods, but I suppose this is American Goddesses, as narrator Sweeney finds her college friend becoming some sort of moon deity who just might destroy the Earth. I love that Hand has not weighted the scales too much toward the Special Spirtualness of Womyn, or toward the righteous Christians holding back the Pagan forces of darkness.

It's a sexy, creepy, romantic book and just a ton of fun.

[Melanti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part fantasy, part gothic horror, part mythology, part twisted love story. It's dark, lush, sensual, and quite creepy in places. "I'll love you next time, I promise" just about broke my heart.

The first third is a bit slow but once you get to the weekend retreat, the pace picks up a lot. There were quite a few parts where I couldn't look away, let alone put the book down.

I was all set to give it 5 stars up until the climax when Oliver is revealed to be the mysterious "woman". Up until that point, I'd taken the "I love you next time, I promise" and the "I'll be right back" to mean that Dylan was, in some way, the reincarnation of Oliver. After that event, I'm not sure that's a feasible scenario - and it not being true makes that relationship even more screwed up than I had perceived it to be.

[Cassandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this novel frustrating, as the main character rarely actually does anything -- events happen to her, and around her, and she drifts on through them, emoting about them but never taking any decisive action. I also find it bemusing that so many people tout it as a feminist work; any novel that suggests that we owe all the technologies our civilisation is based upon to men and that a female divine power would destroy the world is hardly feminist. I have read an interview with Hand in which she says that she is herself a feminist, but that she does not believe a matriarchal society would be any better than a patriarchal one. I agree with her, but what this novel presents is an image of female divinity as devouring violence, and male divinity as the oppressive-but-necessary bulwark against that. I find it irritating.

[Audrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here is my one run-on sentence review: I hated the pretentious goth bohemian intellectual stab-me-in-the-face characters that I can't stand in real life (GOD. HATE. HATE SO MUCH) but I really enjoyed Elizabeth Hand's integration of mythology into her world-building, as well as her lovely prose which is why I give this three stars and not negative eleventybillion because of the irritating fucktardness of her characters.

[Mahayana Dugast · Rating 5 out of 5]

Total EPIC! (Harry Potter for Adults)
This is the finest of Hand's books that I have encountered in my reading collection.

[Sonnydee · Rating 2 out of 5]

The ending kind of ruined this one for me. I was super into the pretentious college assholes being pretentious college assholes, naked ladies covered in poisonous snakes, the whole Matriarchy vs. Patriarchy showdown, and then suddenly you have like three pretty literal but also inexplicable Deus ex machinas in a row and now heterosexual patriarchy is restored because women fuck everything up and are better off pregnant I guess? What? The ending was not thought through at all. Not only does it not deliver thematically, it isn't even a good horror show. If you're gonna say fuck consistent themes, fuck having a protagonist who actually does shit, go bigger and destroy a few cities instead of just a bit of coyly implied incestuous beastiality (?!?!?!?!?). I was sort of hoping Sweeney would be like "actually Angelica/Othiym you probably should go ahead and destroy the world because it's fucked and so am I." Or Annie, who never really gets her justice regarding Lisa's murder and actually what is the point of Annie other than me loving her. The happy ending is pretty pat. And, like I said, pretty comfortable with patriarchy and heteronormativity, because who cares about the queer characters and also women as a class now that Sweeney's got her nearly underage boytoy and a baby on the way who will, if there is any justice in the world, be the vengeful reincarnation of Angelica.

[Daniel Montague · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has much going for it and yet proved difficult for me to enjoy. The author, Elizabeth Hand writes with such a vivid repertoire of words and phrases that you can almost taste and feel the setting. You can almost smell the "sandalwood and orange" that follows one of the main characters, Angelica. The sumptuous style though for me led to almost a repetition that was overkill. Though I hate to admit, I fast forwarded through some of the descriptions and most of the incantations. Another drawback were the characters themselves. Despite the edition I read being almost 400 pages I never felt a connection with them. Even the protagonist, Katherine Sweeney left me feeling indifferent despite the interesting predicaments that she faced. While, I frequently enjoyed aspects of this book and greatly respect the vivid imagery poor character development and annoying characters left me wanting more.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book during exams in my last year of school, and I guess I was stressed out and I must have skimmed it, because I was left with the impression that it was a lot better than I found it to be re-reading it now.

First, the positives: This is a very educated book with many literary and historical allusions scattered throughout - I was very impressed by the effort Hand put into researching various cults of the ancient world, aspects of Mycenaean culture, etc., and by the way she wove this research into the fictional world of her story. I also enjoyed the charming, realistic elements of museum work. Though I thought the most fantastic element of this novel was a person with a BA in anthropology quickly getting promoted to a cushy museum job with her own office (I have many friends with PhDs who are struggling to get any sort of museum job at all), and then even complaining about it being dull and lacking in accomplishment compared to her other friends - ah, the halcion days of the 80s heritage job market!

But I digress. Hand does a very good job of weaving fantasy and horror, and the setting in the first half, at the Divine, was fabulous. I think the novel might have been better served without such a drastic move away from the university setting, or at least if the Divine had been explored even a little more than it was in the first half. I liked that Hand wrote a commentary on the way the modern New Age movement tends to treat ancient goddess religions, and that she chose to explore the darker aspect of said historical goddess cults (even though I thought this was a bit heavy-handed.)

But while I like Hand's fluid, atmospheric prose (having enjoyed several of her other novels and short stories), there were some aspects of this book that considerably detracted from my enjoyment:
Firstly, the characters in this book don’t speak like real undergrads (quoting obscure poetry? making obscure references to ancient cultures with everyone else getting the joke?). At a stretch, some more pedantic grad students might speak like this *on occasion*, maybe, sure, but not a group of undergrads. I also really didn't like anyone in the book, though Annie and Joe were perhaps the most tolerable of the lot. Sweeney, the protagonist, is incredibly ineffectual: all this creepy supernatural stuff starts happening, and she... does nothing. She doesn't research it, or investigate it, or even try to change universities to get away from it. She just decides to ditch class and go wandering around town, drinking with her friends. If I thought some faculty members were out to kill me, I wouldn’t make it easy for them by getting drunk on the campus lawn. (And that's the other thing - for someone supposedly so excited to get into this uni and to study anthropology, Sweeney shows not the least interest in taking part in the academics or even doing her own research into the creepy mysteries around her.) [[Honestly, she whines about getting expelled, claiming it’s a Benandanti conspiracy against her because she isn’t magical, but there was no conspiracy needed – if the Divine is anything like your basic university, anyone who didn’t bother meeting mandatory attendance and submission of work would have got themselves kicked out, or at least ended up re-doing the year. This is totally her own fault.]] I thought she would improve in the second half, when she is 38, but no. More creepy, dangerous stuff happens, and she literally sits around doing nothing while things get progressively worse. This nonsense continues even when things come (underwhemlingly) to a head [[and Sweeney is suddenly told she is somehow special and she the only one who can stop Angelica. She gets sent off to do so, but... just stands there and it's Oliver who turns up to save the day. She doesn’t do *anything*.]]

Equally frustrating is the way a lot of things remain unexplained, [[what happened to Oliver? What has Oliver been doing in the interim 20 years? How / why is Sweeney special? What were those angels were doing in her room back on her first night at the university?]], even at the end of the novel [[when Oliver just leaves, and no one has a conversation with anyone about what just happened or what became of Angelica]].

I found the structure of the plot to be really off: the most climactic scene in the 570+ page novel takes only a handful of pages: [[there is no epic battle, no confrontation, no explanation: Oliver turns up, and suddenly Angelica's massive evil ritual is just... over.]] it felt like a lot of pages were wasted on characters having lunch and pointless conversations, and the plot was an afterthought tacked on in the last 10 minutes before this was due at publisher’s. I felt like I invested all this time, and it never paid off with a satisfying resolution.


Another aspect of Sweeney’s character that I didn’t like, and that she never grows out of, is the constant neediness. She complains about how no one wants to talk to her on her first day – but when people try to, she won’t engage. She complains about how much her career sucks compared to her university friends, but does nothing to change this. She complains many times about how she was never meant to be friends with Oliver and Angelica because they are too good-looking to be friends with her. Then she earnestly complains about how no one as pretty as O or A will ever be friends with her again... aaaand does anyone actually choose / want particular people to be their friends based on how they look? What the hell even is this. She also complains that her other university friends weren’t really *her* friends, just satellites for O or A, but she never actually makes any effort to chat to them, or create any sort of a bond (and is often antagonistic to them). Given that she had a happy, healthy childhood with supportive parents, I don’t see where any of this is coming from – and I did wonder why we never see her parents or siblings again after they drop her off on campus.


Which brings me to what passes for the romance in this book, which I found quite uncomfortable. Firstly Oliver – Sweeney spends nearly the whole look mooning over him, as does Angelica. I didn’t get the appeal at all: he was obnoxious and flaky, and quite disrespectfully infuriating in the way he kept speaking in riddles and poetic / literary allusions, without ever giving a straight answer to anything. (This is fine if you happen to be a mystical wizard on a mountain somewhere, but very irritating if you’re a university kid and your friends are simply asking what you want to have for lunch.) Sooo, I hated him. But then it gets worse. [[Oliver is out of the picture in the second half, and Sweeney is supposedly still so in love with him that she doesn’t get over him for the next 20 years! (Is this really a feminist book?) To the point where she drifts through her life even more apathetically than before, which is saying A LOT. She knew him for a *term*, and not even the real him, because he was off his head the whole time, so what is this grand love based on, exactly? Anyway, then his 18 y/o son, Dylan, shows up at Sweeney’s intern, and in a few pages she is hooking up with him. My issue is not the May-December romance, but the power imbalance, since she is his direct boss. But, more so, with the fact that he is literally the near-identical son of the guy Sweeney has been obsessing over for the past 20 years (and the woman she sorta had a fling with who was her sorta rival for said guy). There is a lot to unpack here. They hook up and decide to get married after something like a few days (so, they don’t even get to know each other), and when one of the characters asks Sweeney if she isn’t projecting her feelings for Oliver onto Dylan, Sweeney is actually offended. Dylan knows that that Sweeney never got over Oliver, because his mother told him, but not that he is Oliver’s son, and Sweeney (along with the other characters) has decided not to tell him about his father, because that MIGHT make things weird. Erm. What even is this?? In the epilogue she is already pregnant (because ofc), and Dylan still doesn’t know that Oliver was his dad. I kinda feel like he must find out eventually, and what will he make of it when he does? Talk about an uncomfortable conversation!]]

Now, this is meant to be a feminist novel that also cautions against a matriarchal society, but I didn’t think that this was handled very well. Sure, matriarchy has the potential to be as violent and dangerous as patriarchy. I thought that arguing for a balance and moderation would have been the obvious point here: an exploration of how both sides are messed up and got things wrong. But as the plot unfolds we are shown that the patriarchal secret society is right to fear the matriarchal Othyum cult, and they are right in trying to suppress it, so even if they also murder people, it’s not so bad because patriarchy (as represented by the Benandanti) is there for our own good. Not exactly the message I thought we’d get here. But aside from the bigger themes, Sweeney doesn’t really have any positive relationships with women in this book: her mum doesn’t feature, she has no actual female friends at work or from university. There is no exploration of the way her friendship with Angelica sours [[or a significant confrontation at the end]]. Annie’s (romantic) relationship with Helen is probably the most positive relationship of the main characters, but Annie still doesn’t have, or at least doesn’t think she has, any female friends she can just call upon (for example, she assumes Justine is Helen’s friend rather than hers). Annie and Sweeney are awful to each other from the first, and childishly so. Also, there are several little throwaway slut-shaming lines (‘her whore’s voice’, ‘whore’s boots’, as critical descriptors), and a lot of negatives in the treatment of sexually liberated women in the book (who are mostly just after using their partners as a gruesome sacrifice). These things don’t strike me as very feminist.

The other thing that grated on me was the use of copious passages of song-lyrics / poetry / incantations, which were written out every time. This is a personal dislike and others might not feel the same, but I think if you’ve going to quote something, it should serve a purpose. There is no need to write out incantations in obscure / dead / invented languages in long form, every time. Same with made-up song lyrics which a character composes in the story – unless you are a poetic genius, lyrics without melody just come across as awkward and clunky, and the repeated refrains are redundant. A verse, at most, might be tolerable, but definitely not a whole song.

The sensitive reader should probably bear in mind that there are some aspects of this book that are quite iffy [[dub-con sex rituals, human sacrifice post-sex-ritual, implied intention of incest / bestiality, animal sacrifice]]. I didn’t remember these being so graphic from my first read-through, which makes me think I either had an abridged copy of this book, or my skimming was even more inattentive than I thought. Also, I got to a point where I would just facepalm every time I saw the words ‘phallus’, ‘golden slender thigh’, or ‘nipple’.

So I guess it’s safe to say I was disappointed by this one. It had the potential to be much better but this potential got lost somewhere in the execution.

[Rossdavidh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't normally go back and write reviews of books I read years before, but upon seeing a reference to Elizabeth Hand, I realized that "Waking the Moon" is one of those books that hovers in my mind, for years afterwards. Which doesn't necessarily mean that I loved it, but it does mean it deserves a review.

The basic plot can be summarized as:
1) young lady (Sweeney Cassidy) goes to college
2) ...and discovers a new group of friends, one or two of whom (Angelica, Oliver) are especially enchanting to her
3) ...and then stumbles onto the fact that the Mother Goddess figure of old is sleeping, not mythical
4) ...but grows up without quite seeing it awaken, and wonders what that was about, and then
5) ...just as she seems to be grown up and leaving all that overwrought college-age magical thinking behind, it comes back with a vengeance.

Now, there are a few things to unpack here. One, this book probably relies a lot on the reader's own memories of college. I wonder what it would be like to read it if you had never been to college. Because, in fact, the main character's college experience seems a lot like an idealized version of what people think college will be, or should have been; a magical and mystical introduction to a larger world. Which, of course, is quite a bit different than what actual college is like, but you know, every once in a while it kinda sorta was like that, and Hand plays well on that archetype.

There was also, in the 19th century, a great deal of archaeological nonsense written about early, Mother Goddess centered cults and societies, much of which was later revealed to be as romanticized as everything else about the 19th Century's Romantic era. The more we learn about truly ancient societies, the more they look less like an idyllic land of peace and non-threatening free love, and the more they look like another era of humans, with their penchant for conflict and power-lust and occasional bouts of violence. Not that this would be the Mother Goddess cult's fault, since followers of Odin and Zeus were fully as capable of doing the same. But the main character recapitulates the same path that all of human archaeology went down (or in some cases is still going down), with great fascination at what is seen at a distance, which becomes less and less reassuring the closer it is seen.

There is also a nice plot thread here about Sweeney Cassidy trying to tie what she saw and heard (and did) in college, with the life she experiences after she leaves college. This, is a fact that hits home in a painful way to many, especially perhaps those who studied hard and dove deep into some field for which the job market has no great appetite. What was that all about, then, if it has nothing to do with what comes after? For Sweeney, at least, all of that does come back, and if it doesn't all quite look exactly like it did when she was in college, she is at least given the reassuring news that it wasn't all just sound and fury, signifying nothing. For more than one reader of a certain age, this may seem oddly reassuring.

The ending, as more than one reviewer has noted, is more than a little dissatisfying, but that may not be entirely a fault. The friend who suggested I read it (as part of our local book club) said she would have liked to hear the story also from the point of view of Angelica, and I have to say the idea did seem interesting. But perhaps it is better that the story leaves us, like anthropologists studying those ancient Mother Goddess cults, still with far more questions than answers. Any book which leaves questions in your mind that continue to surface, years after you read it, is a standout worth taking note of.

[Punk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fantasy. At the University of the Archangels and St. John The Divine, the angels are a little more real than Katherine Sweeney Cassidy ever expected. Her first day of classes, she answers a question that maybe she shouldn't have and suddenly it's like she's stepped into a whole different world.

Eighteen years ago, this was one of my favorite books. I could see it had problems; I just didn't care. I loved the hot, mysterious atmosphere of the fake university with its fake secret society, plopped down in a D.C. that had no room for it. I loved its timelessness, the promise of destiny, Sweeney's yearning for her new, beautiful friends.

It pushed my buttons. I love the story about the normal girl who gets pulled into a world beyond her understanding, and so I ignored the overly poetic mystical prose. I ignored the fact that Sweeney's first person narrative was constantly interrupted by chapters in clumsy third person omniscient. And I especially ignored that Dylan, and, fine, Sweeney herself, seemed to be lacking all but the most basic of personalities.

This time through I couldn't ignore those things. The end still got me in that soft, wish fulfillment place, but the rest was just messily overwrought and confusing. Way too much pretentious mystical detail and repetitive worshipful chanting that I totally skipped over, eyes rolling, tongue slightly sticking out.

It just, the whole thing seems unlikely. Why are we bringing back this female goddess if she's just going to destroy the world? What's the plan there? And Sweeney—she can tell me that she turned her heart off after that first disastrous month of college, but that makes for an empty, boring adult, and a bland narrator.

Bottom line: Mysterious happenings. Ancient gods. The swampy heat of Washington, D.C. Prose so purple it's magenta. Lots of queer characters. Some sexy stuff. Lots of blood and murder. At least one scene that's genuinely spooky. But the story has a heavy touch, and its sense of mystery doesn't last long. Mainly because of all the over-explaining.

Three stars. I loved it once. This time it was only okay.

[Mckinley · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found the story boring. The characters are narrow and stereotypes of archetypal myth figures but not as well done as the classic myths. Tries to use sex scenes to tantalize and stimulate but they aren't new or original.

It doesn't really move along. First the main character is in college then it's 20 years later. She's an ostrich with her head in the sand, so self absorbed and uninterested in her 'friends'. Even the end is just about her own wants to have her first love returned and saved for herself. Depicts the destructive side of the goddess. Bemoans women's plight and more than slight through the ages. Mythopoeic fantasy award

[Eric Hines · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not badly done. Definitely heavily influenced by 1990s grad school feminism, but not fatally so. A college novel, and as usual with college novels of this type (see also The Secret History, the Rule of Four and many others), the college experience is romanticized beyond all recognition. But Hand's romanticization doesn't bury or distort (too much) the more pedestrian adolescent crises real people experience at college. Rather it heightens them and gives them a compelling context in which to play out.

[Karen Witzler]

I tried - I don't like angels. The early college scenes were great - but I didn't like the characters very much. Loved the description of Seventies clothing. Then I made a huge mistake and skipped ahead and stumbled into that whole Pasiphae thing - reminded me of that time I was reading one of Anne Rice's vampire books and the main character sucked menstrual blood from a used tampon - and I was just done. No rating.

[Courtney Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's this quite famous New Zealand photographer, whose work moves me, physically and emotionally. She has often taken sexuality as her theme, and in one series turned her lens on men - a man ejaculating, a naked man's bum peppered with little paper cut-out cupids, a man in a fencing mask; all men who she dressed up, framed up, and presented up.

One photo in particular I love, think to be one of the sexiest and most dangerous artworks New Zealand has yet produced. It shows a woman's (at least, you think it's a woman, you might be wrong) throat, in a close crop, cut off just above her chin and just as the swell of her chest begins. Her neck is adorned with a wreath of bruises - whether these are love bites or something more sinister, it's hard to tell. The work is ambiguous, and beautiful, and hard-edged, and hot as all get out.

Anyway, at a friend's wedding, I was seated with the photographer. And she was one larger than life character - lush, loud, a little screwy, full of that kind of lavish feminine power and potency that some women have and I just don't.

'Waking the Moon' reminds me of the photographer, and the work. Partly because it's all about feminine power rising against the patriarchy. Partly because its all about sex and obsession and youth and youthful sexual obsessions. And partly because it is big and lush and, let's face it, pretty screwy. As it should be. This is supernatural fantasy after all, and while it's not a genre I know much about (does Neil Gaiman count? if so, he and Hand is quite far apart, mostly on the humour spectrum) this was perfect weekend fodder, when one weekend features moving house and the other features a trans Tasman flight. The story rollicks along, packed full to bursting with colourful and learned detail, and as absurd as it is, it's none the less gripping. (Although the author's use of the word 'pleached' not once but at least twice did jolt me out of the narrative ride and into a 'What the hell - that's not a word you get to use twice' moment.)

What Hand does so well is evoke that first year of university, of being away from home for the first time, drinking all night, sleeping all day, skipping class to hang out with these fascinating people, the like of whom you've never met before. Of being filled to overflowing with new knowledge when you do make it to class or the library, of being punch-drunk on hormones and youth and atmosphere. The perfect book for a liberal arts 18 year-old, and not a bad one for grown-ups either.

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rather an amazing combination of horror, fantasy, mythos and suspense. From the beginning when a main character takes an ancient, crescent-shaped blade and...well, let me just say I was riveted to the story from the start.

The title caught my eye in a bookstore. A lucky find! The book is one of my favorites now and I have read other works by Hand.
********************************************
I wrote the above in the mid 1990s when Waking the Moon was published. I just now read a review someone wrote on LiveJournal at some point which panned it as "boring horror" in a long blah-blah about her personal female relationship with the Goddess which had nothing to do with this book; it was clear she hadn't read it at all.
The Goddess force in Waking the Moon is primal. Her priestess is nothing less than Sythian, riding down her prey. Power is sought to offer. If circumstances to bring about that power must be nurtured over more than one generation, so be it. Power is gained through layers of time, through layers of one soul's many lives. Those who have been used may never know. Others may see it clearly from within the wreckage, in the aftermath. Their altered psyches may be part of the offering -- something which focuses and magnifies.
Power lurks, seems, takes. Take a little back and achieve arc in the sky of Nyx, under Goddess Moon.

[Alice · Rating 5 out of 5]

When she bothers to be lucid, Elizabeth Hand is an amazing storyteller. Waking the Moon takes the theme of the all-loving, nurturing Mother Goddess and makes it into a horror story. It's so well researched and mythically coherent, I initially thought Othiym was from a real mythology. She's not, but she seamlessly fits in with ancient Mediterranean religions.

Initially Sweeney thinks of herself as the woefully inadequate, uncool outsider surrounded by her impossibly beautiful and cultured friends. Being in her head when she was starstruck by Oliver and Angelica, trying to belong (succeeding, but unaware of it) brought on unpleasant flashbacks. Oliver is an exhausting lunatic at first with nearly incomprehensible babbling and unending references. He really is incapable of uttering a word that's not a clever reference, and he also eats like a raccoon. Thankfully he has relatively few lines of dialogue, or I feared I'd have to stop reading. Beautiful as an angel too, tailor-made for the drab (so she thinks) Sweeney to swoon over. The equally ethereal and enigmatic Angelica complicates things, as she and Oliver quickly become involved. Sweeney is jealous of both of them. She drifts together with Angelica's roommate Annie Harmon, José "Baby Joe" Malabar and a few others, friends she'll keep for the rest of her life. It was a lovely decision on Hand's part to make the local stoner the most levelheaded, reliable, safest character. I loved how Baby Joe went out of his way to take care of everyone, and even kept an eye on the girls even into adulthood.

I would throw myself on my bed, feverish with jealousy and yearning and something else, something worse: the fear of having been befriended by mistake, of being found out as an impostor.

The chapters following Magda Kurtz were a respite from this sad hipster melodrama as I became acquainted with the secret society running the Divine, and Othiym Lunarsa. Othiym is the Goddess that history forgot. The Benandanti are adamant that she stay forgotten. Only, forgotten deities and traditions have a way of coming back. They surface in your thoughts, they latch on to your present. They're in the air, the water, the animals and the land. Hand's writing is replete with sensual imagery; you walk through the humid air, feel the brush of flower petals, sense the gaze of the uncanny on the back of your neck. She rarely resorts to spectacle, the horror is subtle and cumulative. You're wading in otherworldly mystery, until you realise you've stepped into something horrifying.

Then everything changes at the Orphic Lodge and we leave college behind. Waking the Moon is only half a campus novel. Flash forward to twenty years later, and Sweeney has left part of her soul behind at the Divine. At one point she thinks of herself as in an "emotional coma". What brings her out of it is something decidedly controversial and outré. I suspect this is where many modern readers will give up in disgust. I was a bit uncomfortable myself with her relationship with a much younger man and her friends' son who looks exactly like a boy she loved, no less!, but eventually it became something I genuinely rooted for. After the initial shock Dylan stopped being an Oliver replacement for Sweeney, he became the real thing. Hand thinks in terms of symbols in addition to reality, when she's writing her characters, it's why Sweeney and Dylan, Angelica and Oliver, closing a sort of loop is immensely satisfying and only a little uncomfortable.

It’s like we spend our whole lives walking on this little rind that covers the world, this little crust that’s got flowers on it, and dirt and houses and families and—and then one day, you break through, you just fall right through, and you see there’s something else there. The real world, the world that was there a million years ago, the world you see when you’re a kid alone in the dark; the world that fills your worst dreams until you can’t even wake up screaming from it, you can’t wake up at all …

A very intriguing book, interspersed with myth and antropological discussions. It explores many in1teresting themes, refusing to hand you clear answers.

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

An odd, supernatural 90's story that has an unlikeable character and some pacing issues, but I enjoyed it for its unusual story.

It starts out slow but I thought it worked well because it builds the characters and the world and gives us a chance to really get into the story. I liked reading about Sweeney at university though I found it frustrating at times when she was skipping class and drinking all day; like she was really wasting her chance to be at university.

After the time skip from Sweeney at University to nearly 20 years later when she is in her late 30's the pacing slows right down and I had trouble keeping going with it. I think mainly because Sweeney without her friends or other people around her is not interesting to read and that makes the story drag.

Sweeney is one of those people, she admits herself, that if someone mentions a book she would pretend she had already read it and she chooses her friends based on how beautiful they are because she wants the interest and attention that they get to rub off on herself. She is all round just a very unlikeable character and her relationship with her intern just cements my dislike of her.

Luckily, the pace quicks up quite quickly and other characters like Annie and Baby Joe come back into the story to make it more interesting again.

There are a lot of odd, supernatural events that are never fully explained and things that don't seem to go anywhere but I enjoyed the oddness of it - it's an unusual story and I don't think I've read anything quite like this before.

I didn't like Sweeney but there's enough going on around her that it didn't affect my enjoyment too much. I liked the way it was written and apart from the lull in the middle, I found myself engrossed in it.

It's a good one if you want a book that you can get fully involved in where you won't feel like you've read it 100 times before.

[Johanna Käck · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is a lie that I finished this, because around page 250 I was getting very bored with it and just decided to skim through the rest to find out the broad strokes of what happened (and it was exactly what I thought would happen). Anyway, I liked this novel to begin with, always a fan of strange gothic universities with statues of angels and secret societies etc., but this book was published in the early 90's and well.... It has a VERY 90's flavour of new age/witchiness/sacrificial magic to it and it indulged in every single trope of that genre, which was fun at first but really tiresome after a while. Also, I don't think the mixing between first and third person narrative worked particularly well, and the pacing was sluggish - not as in deliberately slow, more like bogged down with unnecessary passages and even whole chapters that should have been cut. Had this book been 200 pages shorter, it might have been just fine.

I think 2021 has officially become my year of not finishing books.

[Saba Razvi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my top five favorite books of all time. I absolutely adore this novel. And, I've enjoyed all of Elizabeth Hand's works. I'll probably update this with a fuller review at some point, but for now: this is a truly decadent, fantastical, and beautiful novel. You should read it!

[Jay Daze · Rating 3 out of 5]

A novel that is as messy as the Goddess it portrays.

It's the end of the world, as we know it. Patriarchy has been in the driver's seat for over 3,000 years. The Benandanti, an ancient order of dudes, have been suppressing the goddess ever since. But now the Goddess is back with a vengeance and Kate Sweeney Cassidy is in the middle of a mystic triangle between the two chosen ones who have been bred to combat the coming threat: Oliver Wilde Crawford (an eccentrically brilliant pretty boy) and Angelica di Rienzi, a pre-Raphelite beauty with a ferocious will, trailing a scent of sandlewood and oranges.

While I think the book has some major problems, Hand's writing, subject matter and some of her characters make me want to try more of her work.

The first third of the book is really slow - I had to wade through it. The descriptions of the university and the portentous details slow the story going forward. We also get flashbacks from Magda Kurtz, the catalyst character who sets the wolf amongst the pigeons. Magda's ill-fated expedition is necessary to the story but where it is placed further slows down getting to know Kate, Oliver and Angelica. Add to this that whenever anything mystical/magical happens everything in the real world seems to freeze and you get a very slow pace to the start of the book. The narrative finally does get going, Magda fulfills her purpose and goes on her way, but it takes a damn long time to get going.

I wonder if the first half of the book - 1975 - couldn't have been folded into the second half of the book - 1995. That way Hand could have slowly revealed what had happened in the past and thus prevented readers from guessing what seemed to me to be the obvious fate of one of the characters from 1975. Not to drop any spoilers, but when a mysterious figure shows up in 1995 it was instantly obvious to me that this was a character from 1975. If 1975 events had been slowly mixed with 1995 events it would have made it much harder or at least would have greatly delayed me guessing the 'big reveal' that doesn't happen until the final climax.

The novel's plot centers around a ritual. The problem I often have with mythical stories, a problem I had with 'Waking the Moon', is that I didn't feel like Kate had any vital human choice or action to push the plot forward. In a novel I want the main character to do something. Here it felt like a bad Christmas dinner where your alienated family invites you to dinner to 'act' your part for the feast and then go away again. Kate had her part in the climax, but it felt generic and not particular to her character.

The only reason I know that Kate is the main character is that the book alternates between her first person narration and a third person limited narration that switches between other characters in the book. But Kate's character, while engaging in someways - I like her romance later in the book - is so passive that she needs a first person 'I' to let the reader know she is special.

I really like that Hand uses a thriller structure with a dark Goddess villain to deal with a subject matter that would usually turn readers off: the patriarchal basis of Western culture for the past 3,000 plus years and the return of matriarchal ways. Usually this type of binary thought would be pretty dreadful for a work of fiction, but Hand isn't either/or and in the tradition of true artists wants to chart an individual and messily organic path. Her method doesn't work for the structure but there is lots of good stuff in this brew.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once upon a time in college, this book was recommended as something I'd be into. It was the 90s, and we were all striding through a world so feminist that we weren't expected to become homemakers, we were taking sips of non-christian religious ideas from buddhism to wicca, and flannel and combat boots and clove cigarettes were had by all. I didn't read this book then, when I was young and forming my ideas of how the world and I fit together. 20 something years after Waking the Moon was a cult classic, we were properly introduced, and I'm swamped with a wave of nostalgia for both who I was and who the world was.

The first half of the book is set in the 70s, when a teenage Sweeney leaves the bland comfort of childhood for college in the big city. There's a stately old gothic dorm, cocktail hour parties, eccentric professors, an ancient secret society of magicians, and the need to clean up after blood sacrifice all presented as rather matter-of-fact because JFC that's what college was like, the first hint that the world was a hell of a lot bigger than what you were raised to know, and when deeply weird shit went down you just had to roll with it because you were in way over your head. Flash forward to 20 years later, and Ms Cassidy lives the bland comfort of a middle-management position 9-to-5. A Sedona crystals & goddess empowerment guru is on the TV, acid rain is a problem, and there's mentions of the plague that's killed some friends (AIDS isn't mentioned by name, but in 1995 it certainly wouldn't have to be). While it's been easy to sink into the good-enough of this version of herself, when the magic of old friends & lovers kicks the door wide open, her soul is more than ready to sing (and, y'know, confront eternal evil).

Waking the Moon tells a beautifully dreamy and lushly written story liberally splashed with gore (remembering how the Dell/Abyss horror novels of the 90s went, this too is a hallmark of the era), and oh wow is it a time machine. I probably would have devoured this as a jaded 90s 20-something know-it-all, but wouldn't really have understood the dying-by-degrees older version of the protagonist. With her age on me now, I can feel both the youthful naivete that swept her up in circumstance, as well as the compromises she's made to come out generally ok (even when shit gets deeply weird again). There's rough edges and startlingly uncomfortable choices on display in these pages, and in my experience things so firmly a product of their time never age well, but this is magically richer than it would have been in my youth.

[H. Anne Stoj · Rating 5 out of 5]

So, having this book in hardcover is just a thrill. It must be one of my favorite books, though I'm not particularly sure how that happened. I'm also not sure who Martha is, the person that the book is inscribed to, but I'm glad she decided she wanted to part with it.

Waking the Moon is certainly the book that began my love affair with Hand's style nearly fifteen years ago. Part of it is her language, no doubt. The descriptions of the Divine and of other natural places remained as brilliant to me now as they have every few years when I pick the book up and read it for the pleasure of reading it. And each time I love and mourn the same characters over and over again, which really is the beauty of something well written. At least in my opinion.

In other novels, like Mortal Love and Generation Loss, the running theme of the outsider is dealt with. Not just the outsider, but one that refuses to change (and that's more in Generation Loss, really, than the former). Her treatment of myth and ancient history never bored me. Of course, it no doubt helps that those are things that I enjoy a great deal.

Hand's attention to small details, all those sensory ones that workshops and writing classes speak about, are marvelous. Particular smell which is easy to overlook, but it's everywhere from the perfume that Angelica wears to the scent of a swarm of ants.

While the POV switches between Sweeny's in first person and Angelica, Annie's, and a couple others in third, it doesn't detract. For me, it's a good merge. Just an excellent read on so many levels.