COSMIC COFFEE

Clovis hastens readers along the path to enlightenment in this short spiritual work.

In this book’s framing device, the reader is lost in a dark forest. Luckily, they have a guide, a companion, someone to point out life’s brilliant mysteries and remind the reader to breathe. “OUR story is the journey of the state of grace,” writes this comrade and narrator, who always renders pronouns in all-caps. “OUR path unfolds with the light already within US. OUR inner flashlight is guiding US. Gratitude is the flashlight within. All that matters in the next step into the darkness of the forest.” As the reader moves through the forest with their guide, they’re treated to affirmations regarding their place in the universe, symbolic lessons tied to butterflies and waterfalls, and cosmic considerations related to the vastness of space and time. While it’s easy to lose one’s path in the dark forest, says the narrator, the reader shouldn’t worry too much, as there is a Creator whose light burns within them. But, the narrator asks, what will happen when the forest falls away and one finds oneself back in the real world? Clovis writes with urgency and lyricism, with her prose, at its best, evoking a kind of Old Testament–style poetry: “For the Earth is an old piece of clay with thousands of thumbprints. And white brushstrokes paint the dusk of evening sky as God is indeed the magnificent painter and sculptor of the universe leaving a portrait of three billion stars and a supermassive black hole.” Although the book bills itself as a “Meditative Novel,” it is not a novel in any traditional sense. For example, each chapter is only a paragraph long, and fully half the pages are blank; there’s no plot or differentiated characters, and the setting is an allegorical forest with few distinguishing details other than darkness. With little to hold onto other than Clovis’ repetitive affirmations, readers will likely fight the urge not to slip away into the trees—as, unfortunately, there’s little to be gained by following the path to the end.

An affirmational novel that maps out a mystical but insubstantial trek.