A review by wordmaster
Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach

3.0

You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true.

You may have to work for it, however. (92)

Sometimes the stories of why we read the books we read are more interesting than the books themselves. Illusions was recommended to me by a coworker as one of his favorite books. In exchange, I suggested to him some of my favorites (and also pressed them on him from my personal library with an urgency that might have bordered on off-putting). I find it tricky to read someone else's favorite book, because there's a lot of pressure to say the right thing after. Illusions seems tailor-made for buddy reading and book clubs, though.

I was impressed by Illusions early on, and I'm glad the author had the sense to make his point and not drag everything out. I saw something of Hemingway in Bach's spare and economical sentence crafting. It's as if Hemingway wrote magical realism, kind of. Add in the gentle-but-stern sentimentality of Vonnegut and you've got a good idea of what to expect. The shared language of pilots, mechanics, and gearheads did not appeal to me but I see how it serves a purpose. Bach doesn't labor too hard on the dialect or make it difficult to follow by any means, but the jargon is present throughout. Still, the book as a whole feels warm and inviting. Truth be told, the saccharine sweetness of the main "there's a miracle worker in all of us" message is a bit hokey but it seems to come from a good place. There are quite a few parallels with a favorite film of mine: I Heart Huckabee's. The reminder that we can choose how we judge and react to things, that we can construct our own perceptions of the things around us, is a soothing and comforting one. Some of the more outrageous demonstrations don't do it for me, though.

3 stars out of 5. Divorced from all the personal context, the text isn't all that impressive. But our reading is never truly divorced from personal context, and I'm glad to have shared this one with someone.