cover image Message from Forever

Message from Forever

Marlo Morgan. Cliff Street Books, $24 (323pp) ISBN 978-0-06-019107-8

A warmed-over account of an Australian woman's walkabout in search of her aboriginal heritage and the meaning of existence, this latest offering from the author of the bestselling Mutant Message Down Under is more of the same: rage over the aborigines' disenfranchisement, touchy-feely eulogies for their nomadic wisdom and dire predictions of an ecological doomsday for the civilization that did them in. When Beatrice Lake is separated the day after her birth from her teenage aborigine mother and twin brother, she begins a lifelong journey that will take her back to her ancestry and ultimately reunite her with her twin, Geoff, who is serving a life sentence in a Florida prison. After 36 years in the wilderness, Bea decides to return to civilization and repatriate Geoff. Overflowing with intimations of ""Oneness,"" ""Foreverness,"" ""Knowingness"" and such icons as the Rainbow Snake from the mythic Dreamtime, this humdrum little walk on the wild side is unworthy of Morgan's real-life concerns with the plight of the aborigines and the environment. (July)