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In The Fifth Sacred Thing, readers fell in love with Maya Greenwood, the 98-year-old writer who led 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 fut, The word mercury conjures many images--the messenger god, the planet that rules over communication, the liquid metal that defies attempts to be held--images that form the backbone of Walking to Mercury, a story chronicling the early life of Maya Greenwood. Readers familiar with Starhawk's fiction may remember Maya as the 21st-century rebel leader who was introduced in The Fifth Sacred Thing . In Walking to Mercury, a younger Maya treks through Nepal carrying the ashes of her mother on her back as she searches for a reunion with her sister. Along the way, she finds messages (through the pages of her best friend Johanna's diary, in letters from her former lover Rio, and in notes from her elusive sister) that raise spiritual mountains rivaling the peaks of the Himalayas. She struggles with her past and hopes to find out why the power that once pounded through her like a drumbeat has fallen silent. However, like the metal mercury, the answer to her troubles continually slips through her fingers. While eco-feminism plays a supporting role, the star of Walking to Mercury is everything that Starhawk has to tell us about being human. As Maya discovers, no matter how independent one is, one's life is inextricably entangled with the lives of others--parents, siblings, friends, lovers, and even strangers who nudge us in one direction or another (sometimes imperceptibly) despite our best attempts at isolation. Starhawk permeates every step of Maya's journey with emotion, and pulls no punches, hitting us with everything from grief to ecstasy. There is no padding to separate us from the story, but Walking to Mercury is no stark, utilitarian piece of minimalist fiction. This is life, with all its bitterness and all its magic. --Brian Patterson