Moon Soul by Nathaniel Luscombe is a deep, introspective SF novella about a half-human, half-Spyren girl named August living on the moon of Argysi. In this world, the Spyren are known as “sand readers,” a desert race capable of reading the memories of the deceased from their ashes, or the desert sands that contain them. When August’s mother leaves her to go back to “her life in the desert,” neither her daughter nor her husband can follow, and August grows up with feelings of resentment, loss, and abandonment. She comes to battle depression daily, and expresses this in an opening diary entry:
The pain of daily living is catching up to me. I’ve hit a point where I can’t ignore it. I wake up dreading my existence. I want to close my eyes and never open them again. It’s hard to function this way. I go through the motions without understanding why I bother.
Though her father raises her well enough, August grows up with an identity crisis, feeling like some part of her is lost somewhere in the desert. She comes to feel as though she is unworthy of love and happiness, as if she does not fit in anywhere. She yearns for a sense of belonging on both sides, but also for a strong sense of her self, and these competing urges add to her awkwardness as an introvert. She sees herself as a curse and blemish on life after being named after a season on Earth that brings an end to warmth … and brings the beginning of cold:
When I was seven, my father told me that he chose my name after a season on Earth. August. It’s a long month, one that brings in the end of warmth and the beginning of cold. I couldn’t help but take that to heart in a way they didn’t intend: I began to view myself as an end.
August feels that, before her arrival in her parent’s life, they were warm and loving, but suddenly drifted apart when she arrived … that is, they grew cold. Like any other child who comes from a “broken” family, she feels partly responsible for the breakdown. Nevertheless, she is expected to fulfil her inherited role as a sand reader, despite a growing distaste for it. With this state of mind, she lives a mundane existence with only her diary and therapist to confide in.
With the help of her therapist, Cora, August is motivated to change a few things for the better, including finding friends and maybe taking up a different occupation. Her present role in society, though in theory an instrument to help people, drains her more than it sustains her: her clients demand she read the memories of the dead to offer them closure, but being a sand reader feels to August like carrying strangers’ memories for them, to such an extent that she no longer feels herself to have any of her own. It is as if the more she feeds on the memories of strangers, the more they seem to dilute her identity. Though her own memories are painful, August desperately wants to hold on to them as a way to keep at least a part of her identity and origins intact.
When she announces her sabbatical, August’s clients don’t care what her reasons for stepping back might be. It is as if she only exists to mop up the burden of their memories. She is a scapegoat and messiah for them; they want to hail her, and then nail her, with their baggage. But her first steps into the world give her a new access to her own self: first, she randomly encounters Alix—a painter by day and a plumber by night, who centres her own self-perception on her art—and takes home a portrait of her that Alix quickly produces in the street; second, she begins to train with a gardener, Lekka, and soon becomes an accomplished grower and planter herself.
In Lekka, August not only finds a co-worker but also a friend, a sister, and a fun aunt she never had. Through Alix’s portraits she begins to see herself through the eyes of someone outside herself. Slowly but surely, Lekka and Alix fill the void inside August that her parents left, and her longing for family is fulfilled by this newfound one. It’s at this time when everything seems to be coming together that, one night, as she is having dinner with her friends, her long-lost mother pays her a surprise visit.
August’s world turns upside down; the visit threatens to undo months of progress for her, emotionally and mentally. August is simply not prepared to face a past she is desperately running from. Deep inside, she is a little girl who longs to run to her mother and shed all the hurt, but her adult self won’t let her. Between these two figures stands the woman who caused it all, and this outer and inner battle is reflected later in a sandstorm during which August’s mother asks her daughter to share these memories that are hitting her all at once like an attack. She drains August’s memories out of her in an attempt to protect and shield her, to reduce and take away the pain and weight of it all, as if she is sucking out poison.
Within this moment, August lets many things go, most especially the wall or barrier that was between her and her mother. The draining of the memories is the crisis she never had—the cry that releases tension, sorrow, anger, and resentment. The burden that she has carried because she believed herself to be the one who made her parents separate is made lighter when she is forced to share it with someone else. This will prove, however, to be her mother’s final act of love: the sandstorm has weakened her and she looks for redemption in giving her daughter closure.
Moon Soul, then, is a simple but powerful story that most of us can relate to. In it, we see parts of ourselves that we have yet to examine … and parts we ignore. Many of us can relate to August as an introvert finding her way in the world. It’s like looking into an inner mirror and seeing the ill-fitting parts of ourselves—the knots we have yet to untie and the dreams we have yet to pursue. Like her, we are being stopped by our reluctance, by inner and outside influence.
We fear what other people will think if we act out of character by making a career change, having an adventure, or discontinuing a family tradition. Sand reading comes naturally for August and her Spyren forebears, just as people might expect the son of a businessman to become an entrepreneur and the daughter of a basketball player to become an athlete, no matter how stereotypical it is. But August is willing to go off the beaten path, flipping the script and doing something different. She chooses a career that not only gives back to others, but also sustains her—and in more ways than one. She finds sustenance with substance. This is something for which she admires Lekka: “She’s pouring herself where she gets to see the benefits of her labor,” August observes, and she comes to the realisation that “[t]alent brings about opportunity but it doesn’t determine destiny … That is the peace of life, knowing other options exist beyond the talents we are born with.”
Lekka does not treat her job as a typical one, as a chore. She is always happy to be doing it because the job does not feel like one: it feels like therapy, a recreational tool. There’s a typical notion that jobs are supposed to be dreary and gloomy and should bring us stress and unhappiness, but Lekka’s relationship with her occupation reveals why it was a healthy choice for her. Her relationship with her job reinforces the biblical saying, “There's more joy in giving than receiving.” She is happy to give part of herself to the gardens, pouring part of herself, her time, into it, and getting that same magic back—because she takes care of the gardens and the gardens take care of her.
This is why August’s story is ultimately so inspiring. Through courage and hard work, she’s willing to risk not conforming to the unspoken rules of society, to eschew the steps of her parents in regards to career path, and to reject the logic of ancient kingdoms that determine one’s occupation based on a clan system. Moon Soul is a piece of work that tackles the mental health issues that arise from the occupational stress and impostor syndrome which in turn flow from being unable to identify who we truly are—from being stuck between her two heritages, from often feeling like a fraud on both sides … and from not knowing how to craft a third self to escape.