Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0330487868, Paperback)

If the Spirit Moves You chronicles the true life story of British Vogue writer Justine Picardie's desperate effort to contact her deceased youngest sister. In a year's worth of journal entries, Picardie shares a common theme for those who are grieving a death: the intense yearning to fill the cavernous void, to hear her sister's voice. (Picardie's sister's story Before I Say Goodbye chronicles her death from cancer.) Initially, this memoir repeats the same struggle: Picardie tries yet another cockamamie contact-dead-people machine or meets with yet another charlatan medium and comes up feeling more isolated than when she started. Things begin to shift when Picardie encounters a medium who sees Ruth on a bicycle (she rode her bike everywhere) wearing her favorite linen shirt and promising Picardie that the two sisters will speak again someday. And yet, Picardie still feels empty. Finally, a massage therapist tells Picardie, "You know, you can't bring back the dead, but you can make your children happy."

"This seems to me like the best advice I've heard for some time," Picardie writes. And from here she begins the deeper spiritual work at hand: committing to the land of the living, accepting the limitations of death, while still being willing to love and silently engage in dialogue with her sister without a shred of proof of life after death to cling to. --Gail Hudson

Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 157322992X, Paperback)

When journalist Justine Picardie lost her sister Ruth to breast cancer in 2000, she yearned to conjure a voice from the vast silence, to fill the space left by her sister's absence. Over the years that followed, she sought out psychics, mediums, and an array of ancient and modern methods of contacting the other side. It was a year filled with skepticism and belief, emotion and intellect, darkness and light-a personal and sometimes painful search for the afterlife in an age of reason.