John Nelson: The Miracle of Anna
In the “Acknowledgements” section of The Miracle of Anna: An Enlightened Child, the author John Nelson states, “Spiritual or visionary fiction has always been a difficult genre for publishers”; and, as a Visionary Fiction Alliance member myself, I would add that it is a difficult genre for writers and readers also.
In The Miracle of Anna, John Nelson ventures far from his roots in hard science, including science fiction, and attempts to tackle the difficult genre recently re-emerging as Visionary Fiction (see Wikipedia for its definition and description). Drawing on the life story of the 20th-century Hindu guru Sri Anandamayi Ma, to whom the book is dedicated, Nelson has a enlightened guru with marvelous spiritual and psychic powers reincarnate in 21st century California. The basic plot is offered in the Amazon book description.
The story is told simply, its deep spiritual truths embedded in the plot,as it should be. For my taste, the language and style is banal at times (part of the reason for the deduction of a star) and I certainly found myself wanting to find out the rest of the story when I came to the end of the book (a sequel in the works, John?)
The book’s strength is in its main hypothesis: what would (does) happen when a soul, enlightened with a process that covers many lifetimes and includes clearly recalling the lessons of those lifetimes, returns to a society that not only views reincarnation as crazy talk but also the activities of an enlightened being, especially if they are only a kid, as insane behavior. If you can even speculate along these lines, John Nelson’s The Miracle of Anna deserves your attention.
John Nelson is a former editorial director, and now owner of Bookworks Ltd. Prior to this he was editorial director of Bear & Company and Inner Oceans Publishing. John is a prolific author of sci-fi and spiritual fiction and non-fiction, including novels I, Human, Starborn and the award winning divination guide The Magic Mirror. Born on the East Coast of the USA, John now lives in Hawaii.