This was recommended to me by many people, so I picked it up on amazon. A fairly light read, concentrating mainly on plot and leaving description of people and places to the reader’s imagination. Essentially the story follows the monomyth structure, as an everyman gets his opportunity to follow his dream and become aware of the omens pointing him in the direction of that which he desires most - treasure buried near the great Pyramids in Egypt.
On his journey, our hero encounters many interesting characters, each of which adds a little to the boy’s awareness of the world, in his quest to discover the whereabouts of his treasure. Littered with nested stories of following one’s dreams and realising potential, I found the book to be very interesting until the point at which it revealed it’s true colours as to the view of the universe, and its religious undertones put me off. I actually left the book alone for a while at that point, however I returned to it as I don’t like to be defeated by a book, particularly a little one like this. This religious theme, coupled with the lack of descriptive text left me a little cold - I needed more emotion and introspection from the boy to draw me in, to have me sympathise with his journey and perhaps make a metaphoric link to my own life, in the way that I suspect the author intended.
In the end all I really took from the book was the idea of interconnectedness, the benefits of pursuing your dreams and being aware of “omens” or opportunities to help you closer to your goal, all of which were more effectively communicated in books by Brian Tracy or Robert Anton Wilson (Check out Goals! and Prometheus Rising respectively). An interesting effort at communicating on a metaphoric level life lessons discovered by some of the most successful and happy people in recent times, but the religious and spiritual elements left me cold.
