Luna — Sharon Butala

Luna is bestselling author Sharon Butala's second brilliant novel in her loosely linked trilogy that begins with The Gates of the Sun , and ends with The Fourth Archangel . Selling out its first printing within months when it was first re-issued in 1994, this is a classic Sharon Butala novel. Luna is the story of three prairie women at the crossroads of their lives. Rhea, still strong and proud at 80, contemplates her death, and her pioneer life, the years of loneliness she endured, tears seeping from her body while she kneaded her loaves of bread. Selena, Rhea's niece, struggling to come to terms with her teenaged daughter's pregnancy, wonders if her way of life is changing forever. And Diane, Selena's sister, until now a woman cloaked in the busy fabric of farming life suppers, chores and gardening, leaves for the city on a search for freedom, for identity and for self. Each of them is inexorably a part of the vast prairie landscape, its seemingly spare geography in reality as rich and varied as the inner lives of its inhabitants. Luna resonates with our constant, passionate and often mystical struggle to love the land, conquer it, abandon it, and most of all, rediscover ourselves within it.