Recently, I'd seen the title making the rounds (as it had apparently doing for years) as a fiction-cum-self-help book. I figured I'd give it a shot.

This is a short, feel-good book written in a style that recalls the straight-ahead prose of certain Murakami passages (perhaps a result of the translation?) and nearly every paragraph contains a nugget of pithy wisdom from the mind or mouth of a character that could be picked up as a mantra for readers looking for that sort of thing. There's a vague, pan-deist spiritual undercurrent here that comforted the characters, and, I assume, some readers. That said, I couldn't get a grasp on the layout of the book as allegorical, or even find evidence of an overarching conceit, which made me skeptical of each philosophical point. Did Coelho intend to write a book full of enough sloganeering mystics that something thrown at the proverbial wall of the reader's cerebral cortex would "stick"?

Perhaps if I wasn't reading it with so much intention, predicated on others' recommendations (expecting, as it were, some amount of sage advice to be dispensed within its couple hundred pages), I would have let myself enjoy it more readily. But, as it stands, I simply found it a decent, quick read.