kittymiu92

(Copy received free through the Goodreads First Reads giveaway.) I wanted to like this book much more than I actually did, but while it succeeds on a certain level, overall it just wasn't to my taste. I admit that based on the description given here on Goodreads, I wasn't really sure what to expect from this book. The comparison that's made in the book's blurbs and endorsements is to the Wizard of Oz, but I felt that was somewhat misleading. For one thing, Oz had something important that this book doesn't: the Wicked Witch. In Six Weeks, there's very little conflict of any sort, and thus (to my mind) not much of a plot. Annalise travels through a surreal, disjointed dreamscape, meeting one character after another, (nearly all of whom are kind and helpful, except for a couple who barely qualify as irritants), and she learns one thing after another without ever really making much in the way of mistakes or being in any sort of danger (physical or emotional) from anything. I found that I wasn't able to connect with Annalise on an emotional level the way I wanted to, because her character felt flat, as if she were just there to be the cutout for the reader to view the events through -- just the vehicle of the story, and not the one driving it. I think the message of the book is a worthwhile one -- the interconnectedness of everything and everyone, with aspects heavily influenced by Buddhism and similar spiritual practices -- and it works well enough on a purely allegorical level. (I could certainly see the book being used by parents, for example, to introduce children/preteens to Buddhist/new age concepts for discussion.) Reading it mostly as a story, though, I found it somewhat dull and overly preachy. I would recommend it to readers who can appreciate the spiritual concepts it presents without needing it to be more than that.

2020-09-14 13:05