Complex, mystical, and helpful, if occasionally obscure, musings on spirituality.
In this autobiographical work, a real estate broker recounts working in the elite Hamptons market on Long Island and following a path to enlightenment, offering tips to those interested in taking a similar journey.
When she was young, Barbaria dabbled in witchcraft and magic. For years, she chose to follow her dark side to achieve success until she realized she had been accumulating numerous enemies along the way. Combining her personal sense of mysticism with Buddhist teachings, she began tuning in to the more benevolent side of her psyche—her “good witch” persona. “It was not until I got slammed over and over and finally brought to my knees that I realized I was in a partnership with a power way higher than my own earthly self,” she writes. “I call this higher power the Divine Spirit.” The author takes readers down the tumultuous road that ultimately led her to enlightenment by intertwining short vignettes, some of which are quite amusing, with long, philosophical passages. At one point, she wrote the names of each person who had wronged her on individual pieces of paper, putting them in containers filled with water that were then placed in her freezer: “I was freezing bad energy yet still there was always more bad energy arriving as I had not yet frozen my own.” Barbaria is a self-described empath, sensitive to the energy fields around her, whether they emanate from people or places. It is a valuable asset in her real estate business. Houses and buildings, she tells readers, have karma. They carry energy that must be respected or trouble will ensue. Writing with a love for linguistic musicality, the author frequently composes lengthy, intricate sentences, and there is often a beauty in their flow. But she also has a fondness for cryptic constructions that seem to be crafted more for style than elucidation: “My out-of-bounds consciousness harmonizes me with rituals around letting down and perusing what my psyche needs to thrive on.” Nonetheless, Barbaria provides useful suggestions for learning to access one’s kinder, more enlightened nature and to establish balance between the light and dark energies of the psyche.
Complex, mystical, and helpful, if occasionally obscure, musings on spirituality.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9794143-3-6
Page Count: 303
Publisher: My Abracadabra
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A loving and approachable coming-of-age story about generational change.
Strict traditions face encroaching modernity in this memoir of a Muslim girl.
The author was a jeweler’s daughter in Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka, in the community of Galle Fort—at first blush, a traditional Muslim neighborhood. But in the 1950s, things were changing; already, the women of the island went out more than they had in years past and veiled themselves less. Before she reached the age of 12, Azad was allowed to spend time with her Christian friend Penny, ride a bicycle, and wear a bathing suit in public, and her doting, conservative father (whom she calls “Wappah”) was rarely unable to deny his daughter’s wants. However, her father still was committed to “the fierce protection of female honor” and still expected the women of his family to make a “good marriage,” so the author was “brought inside” when she came of age. But she was still interested in furthering her education and charmed by her English friends and Western comic books, so she hoped to attend university in the near future. But after her cousin ran off with a young man and Wappah reacted to the situation in an unexpectedly violent manner, subtle changes to custom and culture became more difficult to achieve. Azad’s debut memoir focuses on her memories of childhood and how she struggled against the more stringent aspects of her Muslim upbringing. However, her story is also the story of Galle Fort as the old-school residents struggled with young people becoming more Westernized. The setting is beautifully drawn, and its history comes alive. Just as important is the author’s father’s journey as a man who’s open to change but unsure of it. The book introduces many facets of Muslim culture with great respect, and Azad stingingly portrays Western prejudices, as when the author’s classmates face ridicule for using henna. She also relates her older family members’ opinions on such subjects as marriage while showing just how radical seemingly small changes can be in a traditional environment.
A loving and approachable coming-of-age story about generational change.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 249
Publisher: Perera Hussein Publishing House
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ambitious and striking comment on art, sanity, and human endeavor.
A writer explores his struggles with mental illness and the death of his father in this experimental memoir composed of a single run-on sentence.
The premise is quite simple: Cowen set out to write and publish the longest sentence ever in the English language without stopping to edit it along the way. The sentence quickly becomes a diary of sorts in which the author explores some of the pressing concerns of his life, including his perceived failures as a writer, his struggles with bipolar disorder (a condition he shared with his father), and his father’s recent suicide. “I haven’t been processing my grief the way I wanted to yet about my dad’s death,” writes Cowen when the subject initially rears its head, “and I’ve been wanting to write something about my dad, and his dad and me and maybe also my dad’s hero, Abraham Lincoln, as he is also said to have been mentally ill at times, or at least a melancholic.” Along the way, the author delves into the history of really long sentences, from William Faulkner and James Joyce to current world record holder, Jonathan Coe (Cowen checks in periodically to see if he’s beaten Coe yet), and similarly long-winded writers. The author also examines other figures suffering from bipolar disorder, like Kanye West, and any other bits of popular culture that stray into his mind. The book is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that veers from critical commentary to myopically metafictional sections about the process of writing the sentence: “Recursivity is something I have been doing with these commas, and the ands, and the whiches, and which is like this, and that is a recursive clause right there, and this is one, too, see they are pretty cool, you just put them in, with a comma, like so.” As an Oulipo-style experiment in form, the volume is certainly an impressive feat, particularly in the way Cowen manages to weave in discussions of mental illness and mania. That said, it’s obviously an acquired taste, and there are portions where the project begins to feel inevitably redundant. But those who stick it out will find that they have a new relationship not only to English syntax, but to the peculiar workings of the human mind as well.
An ambitious and striking comment on art, sanity, and human endeavor.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-66097-064-3
Page Count: 345
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
