You can say many things about Leah Sottile's Blazing Eye Sees All, but you certainly cannot call it boring. Sottile takes a look at the cult, Love Has won, New Age Spiritualism, Lemuria, and a who's who of spiritual charlatans. I'm about to spill a lot of ink parsing out what is in this book. Ultimately, you need to ask yourself this question if you are deciding whether or not to read it. If you are okay with being entertained while not necessarily feeling fully informed, then you should read this book. If an author's inability to truly examine a subject with a critical eye is a requirement for you, then you should skip it.

Love Has Won, and really its leader Amy Carlson, is the main subject of the narrative. Love Has Won is based in....well, it kinda follows the philosophy of....Amy was kinda....well, I have now read a book and watched a documentary on Love Has Won and damn if I still can't explain it. Amy thought she was God. More specifically, she was "Mother God" and she had a succession of "Father Gods". She also drank colloidal silver to the point she turned blue. See, told you that you would be entertained.

There are numerous tangents off of the Love Has Won story line. Some have very clear connections like the spiritual charlatan that Amy claimed she was in a previous life. There are other very tenuous threads which Sottile follows briefly. At times, Sottile will also try to shoehorn misogyny into the story. I felt like none of these things really helped me understand Amy and Love Has Won. Also, none of them were investigated enough to convince me of anything really. That said, they were interesting diversions.

It must be said as well that I saw a long documentary on Love Has Won before the book. On one hand, it made me primed to enjoy the book. On the other hand, I could tell how much was left out of this book which could have been used. The tangents and diversions should have been replaced with more on the cult in the attempt to really shed some light on what was going on there. In the last few chapters, Sottile gets to interview Amy's children and these chapters are riveting. I wanted more, but alas, I had to hear more about Lemuria. It's a problem when a non-fiction book gets a bit too focused on the fictional ideas of the story instead of the people at the center of it.

In the end, I wasn't mad at Blazing Eye Sees All, but there are so many places where it plainly could have been better. The choice is yours whether it's a journey you want to take.

(This book was provided as an advance copy by Netgalley and Grand Central Publishing.)