Science Fiction & Fantasy Award Winning Book Group discussion

Welcome everyone! This month we're reading Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand. This book won the 1995 James Tiptree Jr (Otherwise) Award. It shared the award that year with The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Theodore Roszak.

I don't know anything about the book but I'm hoping for something good.
As always beware of spoilers.

I thought this was going to be some real hippy wicca 90s stuff - like Starhawk - but it's turning into something a bit more complicated!

This is another one of those books where I sort of want to give it 2 stars and 4 stars at the same time - but definitely not 3 stars! If you know what I mean?

How are you finding it?

So, archaeology, magic and a moon goddess/priestess? Have we already read this one? Ha!

This is very close to a book that I might read for pleasure but just misses. The magic is too undefined and hand wavy and I don't find any of the characters to be likeable. It's more than a little wordy too. I guess I'm saying that so far I understand just what you mean. I want to like it but . . .

Haha, yes! Lots of parallels with The Falling Woman

I agree about the magic being handwavey, which was a shame because the goddess religion was clearly well grounded in actual history. But I couldn't understand what any of these women were getting out of it? What was the goddess offering them? What was the benefit to her followers?
The prose was so lovely and evocative - but the actual details of what was happening were just so frustratingly vague. What was the point of anything Angelica and her cult did?

The characters were also frustrating: Sweeney Cassidy was such a cringing, self-pitying, passive nothing of a character. I thought that it was going to be a bildungsroman and we would see her grow into her power. But she learnt nothing - and did nothing - for the whole book.
Oliver and Dylan were both Manic Pixie Dream Boys: all style and no character, and mostly existing to spur on the female characters.

And yet, I really wanted to like it because it was so fey and beautiful....

Nick wrote: The prose was so lovely and evocative - but the actual details of what was happening were just so frustratingly vague.
The first half of the story was roughly 250 pgs. I really think that could have been pared down to 150 - 175 pages without losing much of the narrative.

Nick wrote: What was the point of anything Angelica and her cult did?
I was very confused about what Angelica doing. She wasn't really bringing back the goddess, she was bringing back one of the aspects of the goddess. The destroyer/reaper aspect. That didn't make sense. Where was/is the rest of the goddess? And as you say, what was in it for the rest of the women? They just started sacrificing people in order to bring about the end of the world?

Nick wrote: Oliver and Dylan were both Manic Pixie Dream Boys: all style and no character, and mostly existing to spur on the female characters.
What was Oliver at the end? Was it clear and I just missed something? I just felt like that was just one more foggy, unexplained detail.

Jon wrote: "The first half of the story was roughly 250 pgs. I really think that could have been pared down to 150 - 175 pages without losing much of the narrative."
Yes - or actually the whole first half could've just been a completely separate book about a shy, sheltered girl who totally fucks up her first year at university by taking more drugs than she was ready for.

Jon wrote: "They just started sacrificing people in order to bring about the end of the world?"
Ohh, I didn't realise they were even ending the world. There was no point at all, as afar as I could see.

Jon wrote: "What was Oliver at the end?"
No idea - did he die and come back? Was he actually transformed into a woman, or had he castrated himself? And if he was a woman, why and how, and what the hell had he been doing for 20 years?