How do we find the courage to be true to ourselves. Review on Witch of Portobello, The - Paulo Coelho

Well…. its great to be the first one to write review for such a good book and I will try my level best to write the review in such a way that it will be sufficient and useful enough to make you go for this one.

Since the book is by Paulo Coelho (I always have a lot of expectations from his books) in any case I was going to read it and I must say that it has fulfilled all the expectations that I had from it, infact its much better that I had expected. J

The main theme chosen by the writer this time is “To Be Different and To Be True to Yourself ”. He does talk about following your dreams and to give meaning to your life, as he usually do in all his books, but he also tells us to follow the path God has laid down before us, every person has his own destiny to meet in this life and he must respect and follow the sign provided by Him. We should not avoid but our soul wants, just thinking that what others will think if I will do like this, they will think and they will forget, but you yourself will never, if you avoid it. As usual there are lot of examples in the book to inspire you, to uplift your thinking and to make you believe in the positive side of the life. There is great deal of stuff to learn from and I have quoted some lines on almost every second page of the book.

The book is kind of a biography of a woman called Athena but in a different style. I will take few of the lines from the book itself to make it clear.

I read various biographies, thinking, this would help me, only to realize that the biographer's view of his subject inevitable by influences the results of his research. Since it wasn't my intention to impose my own opinion on the reader, but to set down the story of "Witch of Portobello" as seen by its main protagonists, I soon rejected the idea of writing a straight biography and decided that the best approach would be simply to transcribe what people have told me.

The story goes like this. Athena is a daughter of a gipsy woman who lefts her in the orphanage. She is then adopted by a Lebanese couple and moves there to live with them.From the childhood itself she begins to have visions and talks to angels in her dreams. The family then moves on to London after Athena sees in her vision that the war and conflicts in Lebanon is never going to be over. She joins an Engg. College in London, falls in love and marries a man, but soon get divorced after having a son from him. She then learns a kind of dance technique with which she connects herself to the soul of mother Earth. She moves to Arabia and learn calligraphy and then decides to go back to Romania in search of her birth mother and there she meets people, including her mother, who changes her life. By performing the rituals and ceremonies she has learnt, she acquires the powers to know about the life of people (what goes on in their mind) and to heal there worries and pains. Soon people start following her and she becomes a kind of Goddess to them. But as often happens, the so called religious leaders go against her saying that its against the religion. She starts to receive threats and warnings to stop, but she decides to move on with her mission only to get killed in the end.

When you read book you don’t feel like there is any suspense, but there is!!. It’s a complete surprise. Well.. read to find out, I think I have already described the story too much. We all know, in Paulo Coelho’s book basic story does not have much to offer but what matters is the content in between, but here you get both of them. So don’t wait and add it to your to be read list.

In the end I will add some the lines from the lot of quotations I have made from this book.

“ Please God, my Mother, don’t give up until I’ve taken the shape that You wish for me. Do this by whatever means You think best, for as long as you like, but never ever throw me on the scrap heap of souls.”

“ When you are washing up, pray. Be thankful that there are plates to be washed; that means there was food, that you fed someone, that you have lavished care on one or more people, that you cooked and laid table. Imagine the millions of people at this moment who have absolutely nothing to wash up and no one for whom to lay the table”

“ The ways in which fate changes people are always favorable if we only know how to decipher them.”

Hope this review will be enough to make you read the book and don’t forget to rate and comment. It inspires to write more.

So, Happy reading.

Pyar Humein Phir Milaaega

Vikky Gural