Postcrossing Blog

I’ve been promising for a while that I’d write a review of Emmi Itäranta's The Moonday Letters. This one’s a bit different from the other books I’ve reviewed here so far, since it’s a sci-fi novel written in the form of letters, set in a future where humans have left Earth and colonised Mars. The main character, Lumi, is from Earth, and writing letters to her partner, Sol, while they’re parted.

The book is a bit of an “eco-thriller”, but from the sidelines—we see it from Lumi’s point of view, and she’s not really in the thick of it anyway, she’s just deducing what’s going on from the outside. I think it’ll also read as a fantasy novel for most readers, given the shamanic-type elements of how Lumi does her healing and also interacts with the world. It’s an interesting mix, and one that I didn’t quite like myself (though I know plenty of people who would find it very exciting!).

I’ve talked before about how I love the way letters reveal personality, but there’s a downside to letters which I think kind of gets at what my problem was with the book. Letters are usually written after things happen. You can get a little mileage over a letter interrupted by events and resumed later, but it’s pretty rare for someone to be able to actively write a letter while things are happening.

It’s also a difficult way to get a good grasp of characters and situations. Personally, when I’m writing a letter, I don’t include a lot of physical detail about what I’m doing and how I do it. If I write to my grandmother that I’m done with my exams, then I wouldn’t describe the process of actually taking the exams too much—but in a novel, that description is exactly what you want to see! Itäranta has been careful to include quite a lot of description, to help characters and situations come alive, and I think it made the book less credible as a collection of letters (much as I like a good epistolary novel). She wouldn’t need to describe certain things to her partner: they’ve both seen them, and even if they hadn’t, there’s no need to write to this level of detail.

So that for me kind of spoiled the immediacy of the novel and the “authenticity” of the letters—I didn’t really “believe” (in the context of the story) that these were letters, which is sad, because letters as a form can do so much.

This all makes it sound like I really didn’t like the book, though, and that’s not quite true. Despite feeling the description didn’t seem “realistic” for letters, there’s some beautiful imagery, and I found the idea of the story fascinating. The author chooses to end the story on a pretty ambiguous note, which I also thought was brave and interesting; it might make it a little less satisfying, for some, but I thought it was a nice touch.

Overall, as you can see, not a total winner for me, but I don’t regret spending the time on it!

Next time, I’ll be reviewing a book I’ve wanted to talk about for a while, Lydia Pyne’s Postcards: The Rise and Fall of a Social Network. I put so many little sticky notes in this one! I’ve also promised to review Lynne Kolze’s Please Write, which just came out… and I have a post-related classic mystery called Post After Post-Mortem, by one of my favourite Golden Age crime writers, E.C.R. Lorac, which I’ve been saving for a rainy day and a Postcrossing review. So there’s plenty to come!