In Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, Alice Walker has created a work that ranks among her finest achievements: the story of a woman’s spiritual adventure that becomes a passage through time, a quest for self, and a collision with love.
Kate has always been a wanderer. A well-published author, married many times, she has lived a life rich with explorations of the natural world and the human soul. Now, at fifty-seven, she leaves her lover, Yolo, to embark on a new excursion, one that begins on the Colorado River, proceeds through the past, and flows, inexorably, into the future. As Yolo begins his own parallel voyage, Kate encounters celibates and lovers, shamans and snakes, memories of family disaster and marital discord, and emerges at a place where nothing remains but love.
Told with the accessible style and deep feeling that are its author’s hallmarks, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart is Alice Walker’s most surprising achievement.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 20, 2004 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780739345757
- File size: 183108 KB
- Duration: 06:21:28
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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AudioFile Magazine
Kate Nelson is in the midst of an identity crisis. At 57, she decides it's time to reinvent herself, that the time for sexuality is over. In her efforts toward self-discovery, she leaves her current relationship and sets off, first on a rafting trip down the Colorado River, and then to the Amazon rain forest. There she spends time with a healing shaman, suffering bouts of diarrhea and vomiting, hoping to emerge purified. Pulitzer Prize-winning authors can't always live up to the expectations of their fans, and, sadly, this is one of those times. The new Alice Walker novel is limp and disappointing. Alfre Woodard's performance almost makes the listener forget the self-indulgent writing and New Age banalities, but even Woodard can't make Kate's life lessons more than pedestrian. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine -
Publisher's Weekly
November 17, 2003
Kate Talkingtree, the 57-year-old writer protagonist of Walker's latest concoction, is a lifelong seeker after enlightenment in the carnal, political and religious realms. After dreaming of a dry river, she decides to take this as a spiritual clue and makes two river-centric spiritual quests. In one, she embarks on an all-female white-water rafting trip down the Colorado River, coming home to her boyfriend, Yolo, a painter, with potentially startling news. She has decided that it is time to give up her sexual life and "enter another: the life of the virgin." Yolo, a feminist-friendly guy, takes this as well as he can. Soon Kate is off on another quest, this time in the Amazon rain forest, where she hopes to heal herself through trances induced by yagé administered by an Amazonian shaman, Armando Juarez. Yagé, a hallucinogenic beverage, is also known as Grandmother to the native peoples. Indeed, it turns out that Kate's Grandmother archetype—representing the Earth, the ancestors and those violated by patriarchy and racism—has been calling out to her. Meanwhile, Yolo, on vacation in Hawaii, encounters a transsexual Polynesian shaman, or Mahu, who charges him with the mission of giving up addictive substances. A subplot involving corporations conspiring to patent yagé creates an unintended irony: isn't the mindset that exploits native wisdom for Western corporate greed similar to the mindset that exploits native rituals for the sake of Western spiritual "healing"? Luckily, followers of the goddess, and presumably Walker's readers, are not very keen on irony. Those who retain some affection for that hopelessly outdated and patriarchal trope are advised to bypass this inflated paean to the self. 100,000 first printing;
8-city author tour.
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Formats
- OverDrive Listen audiobook
subjects
Languages
- English
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