The moonday letters

Itäranta (Memory of Water, 2014) blends lyrical prose and an epistolary format to tell the story of spouses Lumi Salo and Sol Uriarte. Sol has gone missing, and it is up to Lumi to sift through her memories to solve the mystery behind Sol's disappearance. Did Sol leave of their own accord, or were they involved with the ecoterrorist association known as the Stoneturners? If so, can Lumi convince Sol to come back? As Lumi's search intensifies, she connects with her soul-animal and travels beyond the known world to try and discover Sol's fate, and to reunite with them at the Moonday House, a house they constructed together from shared memory and experience that exists outside the physical world. In the process, Lumi must risk everything she holds dear. Set in a world where the earth has been devastated, Itäranta raises the question of just how far one would go in the name of love. Part romance, and part mystery, there is something for everyone in this story.

The contemplative latest from Finnish author Itäranta (Memory of Water) eloquently demonstrates how deeply people need love even--or especially--in the presence of death. The story is largely told through hopeful letters addressed to missing ethnobotanist Sol Uriarte by their spouse, Lumi Salo. Sol's science-based worldview might seem incompatible with healer Lumi's spiritual awareness of other worlds, but both yearn for each other. Both are also disturbed by how the human colonists on Mars and Earth's other extensions are shunning refugees from humanity's dreadfully polluted home planet. Now Luni suspects that Sol may have been seduced by the Stoneturners, an environmental terrorist organization willing to risk unleashing a biological attack that will either save life on Earth or end it once and for all. A desperate Luni forces her most precious tool as a healer--her soul-animal, capable of traversing worlds--into a dangerous, otherworldly mission to trace Sol in hopes that the two can reunite in Moonday House, the psychic retreat that they've imagined together. Itäranta accomplishes an impressive amount of worldbuilding in Lumi's letters and makes her longing for her soulmate palpable. The result is a quietly powerful meditation on the human need to share life and love with others. (July)