What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim

A Midlife Misadventure on Spain's Camino de Santiago de Compostela

By: Jane Christmas

Narrated by: Jane Christmas

To celebrate her 50th birthday and face the challenges of midlife, Jane Christmas joins 14 women to hike the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Despite a psychic's warning of catfights, death, and a sexy, fair-haired man, Christmas soldiers on. After a week of squabbles, the group splinters, and the real adventure begins. In vivid, witty style, she recounts her battles with loneliness, hallucinations of being joined by Steve Martin, as well as picturesque villages and even the fair-haired man. What the Psychic Told the Pilgrim is one trip neither the author nor the listener will forget.

©2007 Jane Christmas (P)2015 Post Hypnotic Press Inc.

the author's authenticity

I enjoyed the great deal of self-reflection and also the historical research that the writer inserted so keenly into this effort

Must read for peregrinas

I'm getting ready for my first Camino and I was so happy to find this book. Jane is a woman after my heart. She's practical, a little cynical but with a great sense of humor. I totally enjoyed her journey and can't wait to start mine.

Entertaining and inspiring

We are considering walking The Camino and chose this book at random out of the many offered. I loved this book! The author shared her adventure with humor and colorful stories. I am more inclined to head out on Camino now after listening to her book and I loved that she narrated it. I was sad when it ended!

Kept my interest.

Loved it, kept my interest, good voice inflection. lots of life nuggets presented that gets one thinking which I assume was the point of the book.

Entertaining, sometimes chaotic

I love reading stories of the Camino and this was good fun. The way the group of women came together and then fell out and annoyed each other immediately and broke down into cliques and personality battles was amusing and typical. As Iane says, everyone was bitchy, though I wonder if she was aware that she was equally as bitchy. She piled in with insults and criticism of literally every single person. The descriptions of the places Jane visited were vivid and there was a good amount of interesting history included. I found Jane’s own story/message confusing and contradictory though. She started by being determined to walk the whole Camino, and expressed shock and looked down haughtily at others who took busses early on. However it became clear about 3/4 of the way through the book that Jane herself must have barely walked half of the 800km herself. There were sudden gaps of hundreds of kilometers that were just glossed over entirely. She finished in 3 weeks! Impossible. Very strange and very much undermined everything she had said previously. I thought she also completely undermined the personality she had described through the book by literally falling in love with a random bloke she met 36 hours earlier. From zero to a hundred like a school kid notwithstanding there being no real evidence that they had even talked much or shared any kind of common interest. Perhaps she was writing that part with the benefit of hindsight from getting together months after the Camino was done. That’s fine, but the last 3 chapters are limited to her obsession with this not very interesting guy she’d only just met who hadn’t shown any interest anyway. What happened to the storyline she had done quite well to foster up to that point? I felt it took away from any sense of consistency of message from the rest of the book.