Waking the Moon

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Waking The Moon is a 1994 novel by Elizabeth Hand. It was the winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and The 1996 Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature. It is set mainly in The University of Archangel and St. John The Divine, a fictional University inspired by The Catholic University of America, mentioned in a few of Hand's novels. About 100 pages were cut from the US edition.

[edit] Plot summary

Sweeney Cassidy starts out as a freshman at University, where she meets the mysterious Angelica and falls in love with the strange and beautiful Oliver. She gets tangled up in sinister, supernatural events involving the awakening of an ancient, malevolent goddess. According to the afterword for the short story The Bacchae, found in the collection Last Summer At Mars Hill, it is another trope on ancient Greek myth that prefigures Waking the Moon. They both involve murderous cults of women. Elizabeth Hand has said that she wanted to show that ancient goddess cultures were not all as peaceful and idyllic as we tend to think.^[1]