Book Review|The Spy

The Spy by Paulo Coelho
The Spy by Paulo Coelho

The Spy by Paulo Coelho is of course about the famous Mata Hari who was a Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan who was convicted of being a spy for Germany during World War I and executed by firing squad in France.

I picked this up because it is history, with a great twist. An exotic dancer who may have also been a spy. I’m convinced she was a spy, but I don’t know if she ever really understood that she was. She seems to have been very caught up in herself.

The book was difficult for me to follow because of those. The author, Coelho, seems to weave a somewhat confusing story about her. She knows what she is doing, she doesn’t. At times she wants to get away from the man she is with, at other times, she wants to meet another.

As you can see from the below graph, other reviews on goodreads were torn too. It wasn’t amazing and it wasn’t terrible, its somwhere in between, a solid 3 star book.

It is very unlike me to not write a GoodReads review, but on this book I did just that. I finished this back in April of 2017 and I think I was baffled by what I just read, with no way of knowing what to write for this book. Like many of my GoodReads peers I also gave the book 3 stars.

Review: The Alchemist

The Alchemist
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

34% of goodreads users gave The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho 5 stars.  I’m not sure I listened to the same book as these people read.  Maybe there is some deep philosophical meaning that this book contained and my tiny mind just didn’t gasp it.  I have no idea.  To mean this book “read” like a children’s book.  It was not written poorly.  The story just didn’t appeal to me.  There was nothing that grabbed me.  There was no foreshadowing that I wanted to hang out for and see how it went.  Therefore, I fall solidly in the only 9% of goodreads users that gave this book a measly 2 stars.