AND THE ANGELS WHISPERED...

A woman’s complicated personal life prompts a spiritual journey in this memoir.

At the beginning of her nonfiction debut, Diamond describes the separate vacations that she and her spouse took in 1995. Her husband, Joe, decided to go to Las Vegas, and she opted to go to Chicago to visit her family, and it’s there that she met up with somebody she hadn’t seen in 13 years: Ray, who was once the love of her life and the man whom a psychic once predicted she would marry and live with happily ever after. The meeting between the author and her old flame turned passionate, and she was forced to confront the awkward truth that she was now in love with two different men—and how her feelings for Ray could destroy her relationship with her family. She decided to consult Angel, another psychic who brought up the concept of past lives as a possible explanation for Diamond’s uncontrollable attraction to a man who wasn’t her husband. The book goes on to relate Diamond’s odyssey into the world of spiritualism, during which she encountered many like-minded searchers and mentors, and it becomes increasingly more elaborate as it goes on. The author’s accounts of dabbling in reincarnation theory, tarot, and other mystical areas sit awkwardly alongside her regular references to her Catholic upbringing. However, her choice to consistently return to her memories of the ongoing drama between herself, Joe, and Ray is a wise one, as it grounds what might otherwise have been a formless spiritual quest with a classic love triangle. The resolution of the latter story will strike many readers as decidedly anticlimactic, but the humanity at the book’s heart remains compelling throughout.

A readable mix of romantic anxiety and mystic self-development.