The Awakening by Yvonne Heidt

The only thing that is good about this book is its quirky title.

The main character Elly tells the story of her life in first person. Elly starts with her childhood, remembering it in such vivid detail that it instantly makes the plot unbelievable and makes her feel false. There was nothing likeable about her character. The plot had absolutely nothing captivating about it and it had no hooks that gave me the desire to read on.

In the end I couldn’t get past page 64. Each page was painful to read and fundamentally bored me.

This book was sent to me by a Publicist. I don’t know why they thought I would enjoy it or why they thought it would be the sort of book they read.

It’s about a rich woman called Priya, who has everything she could possibly want, apart from a baby. So she and her husband travels to a Southern Indian villiage to buy a baby.

I felt that as they’d sent it me, I really should read it. Or at least give it a try. I read the first chapter, but it failed to interest me, so I put it on my to-be-read pile with the best of intentions. But I’ve never picked it up since.

This was another book that was sent to me by a Publicist and one I really expected to throughly enjoy.

It’s an collection of gay short stories about passion, love, but mostly lust. The importance of the first story in an anthology can’t be under estimated. It sets the tone of the book and is supposed to light up the imagination of the reader. Unfortunately the first story in this book was full of jarring stereotypes, overt sexualised description and lacked any of the things that make up a good story: interesting characters, intriguing plot and immersive description.

To be honest I’m not sure how this story even made it into the collection. Let alone became the first story in the book.

Psychologist Richard Wiseman presents the As if theory in this book. So if you behave as if you are happy, you will become happy. Simliar to the saying: Fake it until you make it. The book focuses on positive actions, rather than positive thinking. Throughout this book he provides evidence that this theory works through referencing to a wide range of scientific studies.

This book was provided to me by a Publicist and I had three main reasons for not finishing it. First Wiseman appears to believe that the As if theory can solve anything and everything. Indeed on the book’s back cover it states that the theory can be used to: lose weight, stop smoking and feel instantly younger.

Wiseman states that the As if theory can be used to deal with depression. Very mild depression maybe, but to try and tell someone with severe clinical depression to simply act positive is bizzare and ultimately unhelpful.

Second Wiseman is an academic but failed to write about any evidence that the As if theory doesn’t work in all cases. There was a distinct lack of mention of any research that was against his point of view.

Third and finally this book is too long and begins to feel a bit repetitive after a while.

The Awakening is a great book. It’s about three women who call themselves Sisters of Spirits who help people who have problems with ghosts. Jordan is a cop, but when an evil masculine spirit starts causing trouble in her life, she reluctantly approaches Sunny (one of the Sisters) for help.

Jordan starts to fall for Sunny, but the evil spirit wont allow happiness for any of them. The characters are interesting, the plot is well balanced with lots of peaks-and-troughs, the description is clear and Heidt’s writing style is captivating.

This book was sent to me, by my request, by a Publishers Publicist. I read the first three quarters of the book and while reading the last quarter I found out through Heidt’s website that it was the first book in a trilogy.

Having lost contact with the Publicist (it happens) I decided to stop reading the book, as it felt pointless to continue reading the book when I knew I would never get the opportunity to read the other two books.