Walking to Mercury

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Story about Strong Characters
Review: "Walking to Mercury" added depth and soul to "The Fifth Sacred Thing." After reading this latest addition, I reread "The Fifth Sacred Thing" and appreciated it so much more. Rio became a real person rather than a mysterious ghost. I developed great admiration for Maya, the Crone, after knowing her as a young woman who is learning from her mistakes, suffering, living life. It's a story about real people and Starhawk's portrayal makes the reader care about them.

Starhawk portrayal of the evolution of our society in this book increased the credibility of her vision of the future in the other. The novel also explained how Maya came to hold so many of her viewpoints later.

If you enjoyed "The Fifth Sacred Thing," you'll like learning more about the characters in it. If you haven't read it, this book stands alone quite well -- but you'll probably be drawn to read the other because you want to know what happens next. Since many of the characters in "The Fifth Sacred Thing" are descendents of those in "Walking Toward Mercury," reading one contributed to the experience of reading the other. However, the two novels have a different voice entirely despite the common characters. I enjoyed both.

In summary, "Walking Toward Mercury" is an outstanding novel set in the present that beautifully portrays a fictional yet very real life.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful Story about Strong Characters
Review: "Walking to Mercury" added depth and soul to "The Fifth Sacred Thing." After reading this latest addition, I reread "The Fifth Sacred Thing" and appreciated it so much more. Rio became a real person rather than a mysterious ghost. I developed great admiration for Maya, the Crone, after knowing her as a young woman who is learning from her mistakes, suffering, living life. It's a story about real people and Starhawk's portrayal makes the reader care about them.

Starhawk portrayal of the evolution of our society in this book increased the credibility of her vision of the future in the other. The novel also explained how Maya came to hold so many of her viewpoints later.

If you enjoyed "The Fifth Sacred Thing," you'll like learning more about the characters in it. If you haven't read it, this book stands alone quite well -- but you'll probably be drawn to read the other because you want to know what happens next. Since many of the characters in "The Fifth Sacred Thing" are descendents of those in "Walking Toward Mercury," reading one contributed to the experience of reading the other. However, the two novels have a different voice entirely despite the common characters. I enjoyed both.

In summary, "Walking Toward Mercury" is an outstanding novel set in the present that beautifully portrays a fictional yet very real life.

Rating:
Summary: Boring.......
Review: After reading a book of Starhawk's for the first time, "The Fifth Sacred Thing", I loved it so much and the characters, so I wanted more. I was very disappointed with this book, it's so boring... Although I do like the characters, but I've tried to finish the book, only to find myself returning it!

Rating:
Summary: Too long a walk...
Review: Having devoured "The Fifth Sacred Thing", I was eager to learn more of Maya (or any other of the major characters). This current effort however, needed a much less timid editor. There are at least 100 pages too many, and the message and story got lost repeatedly in the details. I have not finished Walking To Mercury yet; I needed a break. I did like the story, and will finish one day, but I found myself wanting to know less, not more..

Rating:
Summary: I will re-read _The Fifth Sacred Thing_
Review: I absolutely loved _The Fifth Sacred Thing_, so I figured I would love this too. The stories are very different, almost not of the same genre, and I appreciated them for many different reasons. While "Fifth" is a utopian novel, this one was so real that I had to remind myself that it was not a biography of an amazing woman. Maya was more real in this story, not a vision of perfection. Like other readers, I anxiously await more novels involving these characters.

Rating:
Summary: Comparing Apples and Oranges?
Review: I enjoy Starhawk's books. I really enjoyed The Fifth Sacred Thing. This book lost a lot of its magic and fantasy of its first one. It was more a book of activism than deep spirituality, on the other hand at that point in time Wicca had not gone very deep. It is very much worth reading, just keep in mind that it is not the same as the first book.

Rating:
Summary: Comparing Apples and Oranges?
Review: I enjoy Starhawk's books. I really enjoyed The Fifth Sacred Thing. This book lost a lot of its magic and fantasy of its first one. It was more a book of activism than deep spirituality, on the other hand at that point in time Wicca had not gone very deep. It is very much worth reading, just keep in mind that it is not the same as the first book.

Rating:
Summary: From someone who read this before The Fifth Sacred Thing...
Review: I find it interesting that I had the opposite experience of that which some of the previous reviewers had. I read Walking to Mercury before the Fifth Sacred Thing. I loved this book, because it was both real and magical. I read The Fifth Sacred Thing and found it to be very disappointing. It was too fantastical! Just my two cents! Peace.

Rating:
Summary: Loved it!
Review: I greatly enjoyed this book and had a hard time putting it down. I had previously read "The Fifth Sacred Thing" and liked it, but treated it as an interesting fantasy with characters too close to perfection for me to relate to. "Walking to Mercury", on the other hand, had characters that were portrayed as being more flawed and human in a way that I could empathize with. While I wouldn't call it great literature, "Walking to Mercury" was a highly enjoyable read that may have even taught me a thing or two.

Rating:
Summary: A bit disappointing
Review: I have been an admirer of Starhawk's work since I read The Spiral Dance in 1987. Although largely ignored by mainstream progressives, her work does a great deal to extend the revolutionary ideals of the '60's and '70's into spirituality, psychology and culture. I have great respect for her as an author and leader.

However, I feel her greatest talent for communicating her message lies in non-fiction rather than fiction. The poetry and lyricism of her ideas and insights come through much more clearly.

To be blunt, although the magic comes through in bits and pieces, the book is also a more or less stereotyped visit to '60's activism. I also felt there was a lack of depth to the character development. Sure, there's a lot of "action," plot, but a real sense of knowing, or perhaps caring, about these people was missing for me.

Also, given that Starhawk is also a '60's activist who has become a leader and visionary of the Goddess revival, it's hard not to see Maya as a thinly veiled version of herself. Evidently Starhawk doesn't want this, but if she didn't want Maya to be taken as a stand-in for her, she would have been better off creating a character with a different history. It was harder to take Maya as a character with a life of her own, when I couldn't help but feel this was all too strongly filtered through Starhawk's own life.

I do tend to agree with the "Gen X" reviewer who was exasperated with the characters' self-centeredness. For one thing, I didn't like the vision of relationships with no fidelity or commitment. Johanna's statement "I'm not a one-woman dog" just seemed cold and selfish to me. Where's the love?

Well, I realize this all sounds negative, especially next to those glowing reviews. My advice is still to read Starhawk's earlier, non-fiction work. You'll have a much more powerful sense of what the novels are trying, often with less success, to say.