Walking to Mercury visit this excerpt page.
Starhawk's
Writings
Walking to Mercury
Walking to Mercury. (New York,
Bantam, 1997). In The Fifth Sacred Thing,
readers fell in love with Maya Greenwood,
the 98-year-old writer who helped lead 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.
"With humor, insight, and a superb eye for
detail, Starhawk tells the story of a generation,
the one we've labeled 'baby-boomer,' ...Prepare
to be swept away by a book that is so well-written
that it's very hard to put down." --NAPRA
Review
"Uplifting and entertaining." --Kirkus Reviews
"A natural writer...an affirming tale." --Publishers Weekly
To Order: please support independent bookstores -- you should try 100Fires.com, rather than going to one of the corporate mega-stores. Click on the banner below for Walking to Mercury:
Walking to Mercury: notes from the author -- Starhawk interviewed herself shortly after the publication of her second novel, herein revealing the "real dirt" on Walking to Mercury, as well as her writing methods, nuclear weapons, and the three big questions.
To read an extended excerpt from
Walking to Mercury visit this excerpt page.
