Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart

Unabridged
Author: Alice Walker
Narrator: Alfre Woodard
Genres: Fiction
Publisher: Random House (Audio)
Date: April 2004
Length: 6 hours, 30 minutes
Ratings:
Formats:
  • CD

Overview

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Color Purple, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and The Temple of My Familiar now gives us a beautiful new novel that is at once a deeply moving personal story and a powerful spiritual journey.

In Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, Alice Walker has created a work that ranks among her ?nest achievements: the story of a woman’s spiritual adventure that becomes a passage through time, a quest for self, and a collision with love.

Kate has always been a wanderer. A well-published author, married many times, she has lived a life rich with explorations of the natural world and the human soul. Now, at fifty-seven, she leaves her lover, Yolo, to embark on a new excursion, one that begins on the Colorado River, proceeds through the past, and flows, inexorably, into the future. As Yolo begins his own parallel voyage, Kate encounters celibates and lovers, shamans and snakes, memories of family disaster and marital discord, and emerges at a place where nothing remains but love.

Told with the accessible style and deep feeling that are its author’s hallmarks, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart is Alice Walker’s most surprising achievement.

Reviews (2)

Now is the Time to Open your Heart

Written by Sharon Allen on April 17th, 2007

  • Book Rating: 3/5

I was looking forward to another book by Alice Walker, but I just couldn't get into this one. While the connecction between people of color from various cultural backgrounds was a delight to hear, the middle class North American character's expensive shaman journeys and peyote-induced visions smacked too strongly of priviledge and appropriation. Sorry, Alice Walker fans.

Wonderful Stories Weighed Down (Just a Little) with Preaching

Written by Barbara Liu on March 16th, 2005

  • Book Rating: 4/5

The stories are what matter here. The story of Kate and Yolo's relationship. The stories of Kate's various physical/spiritual journeys. The stories of those she meets on her journeys. The story of Yolo's awakening in Hawaii. The story of how Kate's house comes to be painted the blue of the sky. It's the stories that matter, and they are beautifully told, with characters rendered with the tenderness Walker seems to lavish on all those who people her fiction. Unfortunately, Walker doesn't seem to trust the story's ability to teach her readers the lessons Kate has learned, so she gives way too often to long didactic passages that sound more like new-age philosophy or self-help than fiction. But the stories are, in the end, worth wading through the preaching, and the lessons learned through them are more beautifully learned from the narrative. Alfre Woodard's beautiful and expressive voice is a pleasure to listen to and helps bring these characters to vivid life.