What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim, Jane Christmas
I thought I was going to dislike this book simply because the author, Jane, visits a psychic before embarking on a pilgrimage across the Camino do Santiago de Compostela in order to be foretold of things that might befall her on her journey. Good god. A psychic? I thought the book title was symbolic but apparently it was literal. Sheesh.
But it turns out my dislike goes much deeper than that.
I borrowed the book from my very good friend CP and was invited to make comments in the margins, as she had already done. CP is one of the funniest people I know, particularly in written form, so discovering she had annotated the book was a dream!
By page 5, I already knew Jane Christmas was going to bug the crap out of me (I texted as much to CP). By page 64, I knew I was right. But as is the case with any hiking book I read, I was also captivated by the idea of hiking this path with none other than CP, who had already written on page 5 that she was “never doing this ever”. This is the thing about me and hiking books. I love them for the hiking parts no matter how good/bad they are, and seem to just mentally skip the other parts. Not this one though. Jane the Pilgrim was bugging me just a bit too much and was also neglecting to report enough on the hike itself to win me over to her narrative.
Page 74: She is bemoaning her aloneness, after just having bad-mouthed almost every single person in her 15-woman group, and is relishing the companionship of her only friend, her walking stick. She is complaining about all the mud, having to use her sleeve to wipe her nose, the cold and feeling homesick. The hike is hard, and it wears people down. I get that. Except it’s DAY TWO. She has TWENTY EIGHT more days to go!
Page 76: She complains for several paragraphs about what she has to endure, when facing constant low-grade persecution as a Christian. Lord have mercy. I invite Jane the Pilgrim to enjoy life as an outed atheist for a couple of days. Or maybe don a hajib and waltz around Quebec or France for a few days. Or be a muslim and try to cross the border into the US.
Page 117: Jane believes that “what scares women the most is the thought of being shunned.” I would actually hazard a guess that what scares women the most is the thought of being raped or murdered, but what do I know.
Page 129: After organizing 15 women to come together on a trip to hike the Camino, Jane can’t figure out why they are looking to her to lead them and are then disappointed when she fails to rise to the occasion. In what may be the peak of her self-delusion, Jane can’t understand why she has trouble bonding with women. Perhaps now that she’s done writing this book she’ll take a moment to read it…
Page 163: Jane the Pilgrim waxes on about her refusal to buy/wear a rain poncho because it is orange and lacks style. I think I’ve hit on one of the reasons why the other women in her group don’t like her very much. Her vanity is almost too much to tolerate.
By the end of the book, Jane manages to make a couple of female friends and even acquires a damaged boyfriend who lasts beyond the end of the book. So maybe she did manage to mellow a little during her pilgrimage and, with luck, she found something of what she was looking for. But there was nothing really in this book to offer other than her own un-self-aware journey of failing to meet people, over-generalizing about women, and forgetting to talk about the spiritual nature of the hike itself.
Rating: skip it.