"No one person can fix you or save you because it is your soul-work, your lesson. Start now."
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Calling All Souls—You Do Matter!
Collective Wisdoms by Fiona Frances Sheila M. Trask
book review by Sheila M. Trask
The secret is out. Since Rhonda Byrne published The Secret in 2006, the power of positive thinking via the "law of attraction" has been explored in a parade of popular books. While many of these seek to explain the theory behind the manifest-your-dreams philosophy, Fiona Frances cuts right to the chase and shows us how to do it in this collection of poems, quotations, lists, and worksheets. Frances offers a slender volume at just under sixty pages, but her enthusiasm fills every page. Concrete poems—words arranged in abstract shapes—shout out the modern equivalent of the self-esteem boosting affirmations of the 1980s. Instead of "I am good enough," though, Frances tells us to get moving with lessons like, "Set goals. Define your life. Write your script."
Her commandments are offset by quotations from a wide variety of sources, from Anita Roddick to Winston Churchill to George Bernard Shaw. Adding to the variety, Frances includes journal space for designing a life plan, and unexpected entries like a list of "Super Foods for Super Health" that encourages us to eat more broccoli and squash. What Calling All Souls lacks in depth, it makes up in diversity. There are a lot of exclamation points here, and the fervor may be enough to convince a skeptic that "what you think is what you create." For those who already follow the law of attraction, however, Calling All Souls can be uplifting devotional reading.