I’ve read five James Tiptree, Jr. Award winners before now and thought very highly of all of them. This is the first I’ve read that I had trouble with, though on the whole I think it’s a solid book.
Katherine Sweeney Cassidy starts to attend University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine. There she meets Oliver Crawford and Angelica di Rienzi, members of the beautiful people. They are pretty, and rich, and legacies, and sleeping together. Sweeney falls madly in love with Oliver though he expresses no interest beyond friendship, and they hang out endlessly.
Meanwhile, the University is actually the headquarters for an ancient order of (possibly) magicians, the Benandanti, like the Illuminati only more secret and powerful. At the beginning of the book, they get a sign. It involves Angelica and Oliver. A Benandanti traitor gives Angelica an ancient crescent broach that has a connection to pre-Christian goddess cults of Europe, which the Benandanti have been carefully suppressing for millenia.
And what does Sweeney have to do with it? She’s sand in the gearworks, essentially. She serves as both narrator and as something to come between Angelica and Oliver. It seemed to me that her infatuation with Oliver was induced by sorcery. Anyhow, in a plot-line that is obvious from near the beginning, everything is building up to a confrontation between the patriarchy protecting Benandanti and a woman-centered goddess cult revival.
Mostly I really enjoyed the things that I suspect contributed to this winning the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. The goddess cult is more along the lines of Kali the Destroyer than Aphrodite. Key to the cults are sacrifices, usually of men. The book is not for the squeamish. The women are not bloodthirsty, but along stereotypical lines of Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction. They are not just shrill, crazy harpies, but intelligent driven characters with purpose. The whole sense of impending collision between the Benandanti and the Moon Goddess is chilling.
But there are some drawbacks too, mostly in writing style rather than thematic substance. The book is far too long at 497 pages, particularly given that I knew exactly where it was going early on. Hand includes lengthy descriptions of everything that happens. A fight with a bull takes two plus pages, when it could have been a couple of paragraphs.
In addition, at the beginning everything is told from Sweeney’s point of view. She’s not part of either side in the clash of religions, due to be rather normal rather than gifted. This makes the opposing sides rather dark and mysterious from Sweeney’s perspective. Mysterious and scary is good for horror. But midway through the book Ms. Hand starts telling parts of the story from other people’s viewpoints, particularly Angelica di Rienzi who is a champion of the goddess cults. Told from her point of view, she became familiar to me as a reader, rather than being othered
in the cults. From a feminist perspective, this is awesome; she gets her own voice. For a horror reader though, it takes away a lot of her scary factor.
For some folks, my issues won’t be a problem. Many of the reviews I’ve read of the book laud the lush descriptions that I thought tedious. For others, the clash of cults will be totally off-putting rather than cool.
Title: Waking the Moon
Author: Elizabeth Hand
Cover creator: Gene Mydlowski
Imprint / publisher: HarperPrism / HarperCollins
Length: 497 p.
Publication date: 1995
ISBN-10: 0-06-105443-7
