The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult
“The deceased could take either a land route or a water route to get to the field of offerings, which is the ancient Egyptian version of heaven. No matter which path you took, you wound up where you were supposed to be.” We are all sailing through life just to reach the end. The end , i.e. Death, is the ultimate truth being sought by life. The recent read by Jodi Picoult presented this process of life/living and death/dying through a superb tale of fiction and Egyptology. This book is an homage to an ancient Egyptian coffin text, also called “The Book of Two Ways,” which contains one of the first known maps of the underworld. In Egyptian mythology, Water and Land refer to the “Two Ways,” alternate routes to the afterlife. The story is told in multiple timelines about a middle-aged woman, Dawn, who works as Death Doula (an interesting profession which I never knew existed!!) …her choices and her way of questioning her life, and the saga of other related persons in her life...