Book: Calls to Mystic Alice: A Psychic and Her “Spooks” Explain Karma, Reincarnation, and Everything Else You Forgot on Your Way to Earth

Author: Alice Rose Morgan

Why I Consider This Book Odd: This is one I declared odd based solely on the title and subtitle and my instincts were correct. New Age Fluff for the win.

Type of Book: New Age, New Age Fluff

Availability: Published by Llewellyn, that bastion of alternative religious ideas, in 2006, this book is still available. You can get a copy here:

Comments: I am not one to suffer New Age Squick lightly, though I love New Age Fluff. The difference between Squick and Fluff can be a hard line to see for some of my readers, but I define it thusly: If a book features endless accounts of people putting themselves in hardcore danger because us Westerners are too arrogant to see things correctly, it is Squick. Think back to Aunt Ruth in People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead and how she refused all medical treatment for her cancer and tried to treat it with crystals on pendulums and what amounted to self-affirmations? The woman who very likely died in extraordinary pain because she rejected the evils of Western medicine. That, my friends, is New Age Squick.

Now, if a book seems like it was written by your sweet granny, and includes a mish mash of world religion presented in a respectful, though at times baffling way, and the person writing it seems more like they have your best interests at heart rather than pushing a bizarre agenda that involves but is not limited to dead scientists on the planet Marduk telling us how to live, then you are dealing with New Age Fluff. Calls to Mystic Alice is New Age Fluff, and fun Fluff at that, the sort of Fluff that doesn’t leave you feeling greasy and smelling of cigarette smoke the way reading Sylvia Browne does.

Evidently, Alice Rose Morgan hails from and procreated her own family of people with odd abilities. Without even an ounce of awareness that Phillip Roth wrote The Human Stain, Alice Rose insists that “Spooks” reveal to her knowledge, knowledge that not only helps her discover the truth in her own life, but leads her to be able to tell others how to find their own answers. Alice claims she never advertised her business, the whole phone call thing being from word of mouth, people sending her checks after the readings, and I sort of believe that was the case before this book was written. Still, I managed to find a website for Mystic Alice with a contact page at www.callstomysticalice.com. However, the server seems to be down as of this writing. Perhaps Alice’s spooks worried that she was becoming too commercial.