Skip to content
Answering Your Questions About Reactor: Right here.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter. Everything in one handy email.
When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

Reactor

Susan Palwick’s Mending the Moon is a very hard book to describe. It’s about life and death—but isn’t everything, when you come down to it? I’ve raved about Palwick before, her amazing SF novel Shelter, her fascinating fantasy The Necessary Beggar, and her disturbing collection The Fate of Mice. Mending the Moon is like and unlike these. It’s like them in being terrifically well-written, but it’s not like them in that it is, I suppose, a mainstream novel. It’s about people in the real world. It doesn’t have fantastical elements, except in the superhero comic book that many of the characters read, “Comrade Cosmos.” It’s really wonderful and I recommend it highly, but I find it remarkably hard to describe.

I’ve read this book twice now, and I still don’t know how to talk about it properly. It’s rare for this to happen to me. I don’t want to go anywhere near spoilers. The easiest thing to do would be to talk about the characters—it has really terrific characters. But I don’t want to do that, because part of the joy of the book is discovering them, the nice ones and the prickly ones and the troubled ones.

Let’s see. It’s set in present day Reno and Seattle, among a group of people connected by the murder of Melinda Soto. That makes it sound like a mystery, but it really isn’t! Anything but. It’s a brilliantly written piece of fiction about people who feel real, people who cope with awful things happening in different ways, people you care about—and that includes the characters in the comic. It’s not so much about death as it is about grief and healing. I really enjoyed this book, but I also cried a lot reading it. It was a harrowing experience. I stayed up until 3am because I couldn’t put it down.

On the cover I compared it to Gail Godwin and Madeleine L’Engle, and I think expanding on that could be useful. Palwick’s a Christian, as are both of them, and they all have a troubled relationship with churches and God and what Christianity means in the world. They’re not coming to it in a preachy way or a way that seems irritatingly to have all the answers. The L’Engle I was particularly thinking of is A Severed Wasp, which like this is a mainstream book by somebody who’s quite familiar with things on the genre side of the line. If you like L’Engle and Godwin you’ll probably like it. And if you’ve read other Palwick you’ll definitely like it. It’s a book about difficult moral questions, and one that doesn’t have easy answers.

Probably the best thing you can do is read the excerpt and see what you think.

 

Mending the Moon is available now from Tor books.


Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published two poetry collections and nine novels, most recently the Hugo and Nebula winning Among Others. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.

About the Author

About Author Mobile

Jo Walton

Author

Jo Walton is the author of fifteen novels, including the Hugo and Nebula award winning Among Others two essay collections, a collection of short stories, and several poetry collections. She has a new essay collection Trace Elements, with Ada Palmer, coming soon. She has a Patreon (patreon.com/bluejo) for her poetry, and the fact that people support it constantly restores her faith in human nature. She lives in Montreal, Canada, and Florence, Italy, reads a lot, and blogs about it here. It sometimes worries her that this is so exactly what she wanted to do when she grew up.
Learn More About Jo
Subscribe
Notify of
guest
10 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments