I absolutely adored this story/ insight. Thought pattern.

A beautiful book and I was fully lost in the story of Maya and Royce as we Journey through the six principles.

A short and very effective read.

Three and a half stars. This is a non-fiction book camouflaged as fiction. What I do like are the six principles and there are some good insights and spiritual lessons in the book. But I don't understand why the author felt he should market this as fiction. It's terribly written (from a fiction point of view). The author has no understanding of basic fiction rules, for example the use of adverbs and terrible speech tags. Nothing happens in the book, and perhaps most annoyingly, the main character is a single dad with two daughters, who don't appear at all in the book apart from being mentioned in passing. The MC sleeps all day, comes home late, etc. Where are his children?

3.5 Stars

I must admit I'm not sure how to feel about this book. I feel like the premise of the book was good, but the development could be improved.

The main character is a recent widower trying to get used to the new normal without his wife. He is a parent, but his children are conveniently away from summer camp for the duration and are rarely mentioned. He meets a Hindu woman who shares certain "secrets" about life with him. These secrets are life-changing tips that have great potential to improve the lives of the main character and the world he can reach through his writing.

The book started off in a bit of a rush with insufficient explanation of the main character's loss and how it has truly impacted his day-to-day life. In fact, I find that the subtitle "A story about loss, letting go, and learning to soar..." was somewhat misleading. In my opinion, the concepts of loss and learning to let go didn't get enough of a focus to warrant being mentioned on the cover. Yes, the lessons learned can help you get over loss and learn to let go, but in my opinion, those are links you have to make for yourself, not explicitly stated in the book. As such, I disagree that this was a story about loss or letting go. Yes, the potential is there for the reader to learn to soar, but the reader will be the one to link the lessons with their own life in practical ways.

I expected the Author's Note to give more information about the source of the "historical text" that is the focus of the book. Having not studied history, I don't know if it's a real text or a figment of the writer's imagination. This should be stated explicitly in the author's note. Finally, for some reason I thought this was a Christian book. While the main character is a Christian, I would classify this as more of a spiritual book than a Christian one.

Very informative book. Full of a lot of useful information. This book will also be very useful for future reference.

I have felt the need to let go of lots of drama lately so I jumped at the chance to read this fine story. I immediately began relating to the characters and reading this brought back the same feelings of hope Ive had before. Compassion and healing are so important to us all . I felt those things while I read this story about people who mysteriously meet and the relationship is life changing. I love this book. Please read this if you are in need of a chance to smile again and bring lots of good into your life.

“Words are powerful tools. Whether they are written or spoken, they contain spiritual elements that can be influential in my ways and on many levels.”

The Mystics Gift is a story about a man named Royce recovering from a tragedy. He was introduced to an exotic mentor named Maya. Maya takes Royce on a journey of self discovery in around six days. Sharing with him the most powerful principles that would eventually set him free and transform him to a better man and allowing him to let go of the anger, guilt and pain by the tragedy he went through.

A lot of what is said reminded me a bit of Paulo Coelho’s books and The Book of Mistakes by Skip Prichard. The words were definitely inspiring and the six principles were empowering and life changing but sadly I did not enjoy the story itself much.

This might have been the most inspirational book. I have ever read. It is a truly empowering read that encourages reflection on six simple principles that possess the capacity to not just transform anyone's life but to guide that person to transforming the lives of others and the world around them.

This book was not structured like a typical self-help book, which I appreciated. It was structured around two main characters: Royce, a self-help author and former professional tennis player who has recently lost his wife, and Maya, a half-Indian and half-British women whose father was Gandhi's righthand man and who becomes Royce's mentor and spiritual guru as it were.

The core premise of this book is that Gandhi wrote a piece outlining six essential principles that have the power to grant anyone immense spiritual wisdom, but because he believed that those six principles had the potential to be used for good or for ill, he chose to limit the number of copies of this volume he made. He kept one volume for himself and entrusted the rest to his most trusted friends and supporters. One of these trusted friends and supporters was Maya's own father, who passed the book onto her upon his death. Now Maya is passing those same principles in the book onto Royce, and, through Royce, onto the readers of The Mystic's Gift.

The Mystic's Gift functions as a profound reminder of virtues like gentleness, generosity, gratitude, precision, choosing our words with care, and persistence. Even more wonderful is that these meditations transpire in Maya's beautiful gardens, which we are encouraged in the beginning of the book to regard as a metaphor for life.

This is the kind of book I would re-read for inspiration and would recommend to others who are looking for a truly transformative inspirational read!

(In the interest of full disclosure, I received a free promotional copy from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.)

I really liked the message of this book and the ideas that were presented. It is a short book and doesn't go into a lot of depth into the characters and I found them both to be kind of boring because of it. Other than that I did like the story.

This is a transformative book, and it was intended to be such. Maya is the name of a guru, who instructs a pupil in transforming his life, in a spiritual way. She uses principles that changes the way he looks at things. The principles are said to have originated with Ghandi, and his freedom movement, and been left to a select group of his followers. Though I do not know if this is true or not, I still enjoyed the book.Thanks to netgalley and the publishers for giving me an advance copy of this book.