Valley of the Moon

by Melanie Gideon

"Lux is a single mom struggling to make her way in the world when she stumbles across an idyllic town in the Sonoma valley where she feels instantly at home. It seems like a place from another time--until she realizes it actually is. One night in 1906, an earthquake left Greengage stuck in the past. Lux must keep one foot in her world, raising her son as well as she can with the odds stacked against her, but every day she is more strongly drawn in by the sweet simplicity of life in Greengage, and by the irresistible connection she feels with a man born decades before her time. Soon she finds herself torn between her ties to the modern world-- her adored son--and the first place she has ever felt truly at home."--

• ISBN10: 0345539281
• ISBN13: 9780345539281
• Publish Date: 26 July 2016
• Publish Status: Remaindered
• Imprint: Ballantine Books
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 416
• Language: English

Reviews

[Leah]

One of the things that intrigues me most about the book world is that sometimes a book will come out without a lot of fanfare. Which is a bit bizarre considering the prices publishers pay to publish a book, so you’d think they’d try to get the book in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Valley of the Moon is one such a book - I read Wife 22 years ago, and I loved it, and I only knew of Valley of the Moon because I was searching new books on my local library’s website. Otherwise, I would have had no idea which would have been devastating, because Valley of the Moon was a brilliant read.

Valley of the Moon seems as if it’s similar to The Time Traveler’s Wife. I can’t say for sure as I haven’t read TTTW (I KNOW) but both feature time travel so we’ll go with that. In 1906 you have the community of Greengage - trapped after an Earthquake made a fog descend that kills anyone who tries to go through it (RIP piglets, I was NOT okay with that). And then in 1975 we have Lux, a single mother, doing her best to make ends meet in San Francisco in the 70s. She goes camping one night while her son, Benno, visits his grandparents and wakes up in the middle of the night to see the fog, walks through it and ends up in Greengage, barely able to believe what she’s seeing.

Valley of the Moon had such an intriguing concept and I loved the simplicity of the life in Greengage - planting anything you could need to eat, raising chickens, just living off the land y’know? No phones, no Internet, no worries. It just made me feel so blissful. Throw in a ton of books and that would suit me down to the ground. Not having to work, or, rather, being able to work wherever you like - picking fruit, or harvesting potatoes or mucking out stalls, etc. *Deep content sigh* And to see the differences from 1906 to 1975 was eye-opening. When Lux reels off a list of things that Joseph and everyone at Greengage has missed, it’s insane (and I am still not over Laika the dog - what the hell, Russia?!). It’s so eye-opening to think what can change in just a handful of years.

There is just so much to unpack from this book - Lux’s life in 1975 isn’t great, and I can see why she was so sucked into the life at Greengage, why the people there fascinated her. I loved Joseph’s steady calmness, the way they’d chat each evening, as if they weren’t from different decades. I loved the back and forth between the two years and the heartbreak the ensued everytime the fog wasn’t there. I liked Lux’s relationship with her son, Benno. It was so pure, so full of love. I assumed this was just about a woman running away to a cult, but I was so, so wrong. This book was so much more than that. And Greengage was not a cult, and if it was, I would join it in a heartbeat.

It made me weep, it made me happy, it made me just feel the whole entire spectrum of emotions. It’s the kind of book you think about when you’re not reading it, that you don’t forget. It’s a classic. I loved every page of Valley of the Moon, it was the kind of book I never wanted to end. I wanted to read about Lux, Joseph, Benno for the rest of my days. I really, really loved Valley of the Moon. It’s completely different to Wife 22, and shows just how good a writer Melanie Gideon is. She just nailed everything about this book and it was just an incredible, unforgettable read.

[gmcgregor]

Melanie Gideon's Valley of the Moon, a time-travel book with a romance element, is told in alternating viewpoint chapters: that of Joseph, living at the turn of the 20th century in Greengage, a kind of commune in the Bay Area, and that of Lux, a single mother of a biracial child living in 1975 San Francisco and working as a waitress to make ends meet. Joseph's community in the Valley of the Moon experiences the earthquake that rocked San Francisco in 1906, but in a very different way: they find themselves surrounded by a thick, poisonous fog, cutting them off completely from the outside world. Until one day, when Lux walks out of the fog and into their lives.

Lux, for her part, has just reluctantly shipped off her young son Benno to visit her estranged parents in New England for a month. She decides to go camp in the Valley of the Moon one night, and awakens to find herself surrounded by fog. She walks through, and meets Joseph, his wife Martha, his sister Fancy, and the rest of the people who make up Greengage. Joseph left his wealthy life in Europe and founded the community based on the principles his warm-hearted, egalitarian mother lived by: everyone works, and everyone's work is valued. Lux finds herself enjoying her time in the past, and develops a rough estimate of how time passes in Greengage relative to the real world, allowing her to make periodic visits without being missed.

Well, mostly. Two major developments in the book stem from time working differently than it was "supposed" to. If you're a reader who wants a logical explanation for the events of the books you read, this will likely be bothersome. But for me, I found it kind of refreshing that there was never any real attempt at an explanation of how or why the time travel happened or worked. It's a device that can cause many a plot hole if there's too strong an attempt to get into the mechanics of it, and I think that for all practical intents and purposes, you either have to buy into time travel in a story or put it down. Besides, Valley of the Moon isn't trying to tell a story about particle physics or whatever it might be that would make time travel possible. It's a story about two people, from two different times, building a connection.

The immediate comparison to be made for any time travel relationship story is The Time Traveler's Wife. Which is a high bar to clear, because many people (myself included) really liked that book. And while this one isn't as good, I was still surprised at how much I did enjoy it. It's not the type of book I'm usually drawn to, but Gideon paints interesting, complex characters (particularly Lux) and tells a compelling story about them. I liked the way she handled the romance, neatly sidestepping the insta-love that drives me up the wall about a lot of books in the genre and instead giving it time to develop organically. I also liked that it wasn't the most important element of the narrative: Lux's relationships with her family, friends and co-workers, and her own personal development, are all given plenty of space to grow. This novel isn't going to change anyone's world, but it's easy and pleasurable to read, and that's what counts at the end of the day. I'd recommend it to anyone.