The Moonday Letters

Mixed feelings on this book. I'm glad I read it, I enjoyed it. Her world building is interesting and deftly revealed. But it's a strangely passive book with very little happening. A lot of that is because of the structure of the storytelling, the narrator writing letters to the person actually doing the action. It's a mystery investigation of a sort but without any active investigatory narrative. I also didn't care for the second story, the spiritual / healer stuff, and particularly didn't like when she started take mystical walks on the astral plane. Just not my thing. But that's all a bit unkind and like I said, the book did entertain me and I think about it.

My real complaint, or maybe admiration, is the ambiguity of the moral valence of the main story, the big reveal. What moral judgement are we supposed to make about the events? Is Sol a hero who sacrifices things for an environmental cause? Because I'm going with a cynical reading. The Stoneturners are evil ecoterrorists, Sol is a manipulative and naive sociopath, and Lumi is his passive enabler / victim. The way Sol reveals the whole plan in one final letter seems particularly cruel. I think the author intended something more morally ambiguous but "inert landscapes have as much right to existence as human beings" is just a nonsense position IMHO.