Beyond These Four Walls

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY FEB 1, 2004

In this conventional but informative psychic autobiography, medium Occhino traces her gift to her mother's working-class New York Italian family, in particular to her grandmother Rosie. The author experienced, witnessed or heard stories of spirit guides, premonitions and telepathy before she graduated from high school and entered into an early marriage. She had her first psychic contact with evil as a single mother. If she doesn't believe in a conventional devil"with a pitchfork living underground in a place called hell," she does believe"negative people and negative energy can make our lives like hell." The author's personal beliefs make a favorable impression--she's adamant that the receiver of a psychic reading has free will, for example. When Occhino's mother says a Novena to St. Teresa for the author's seriously ill daughter and the author subsequently has a vision of a woman named Teresa, one can't rule out the possibility that her high stress load led to hallucinations. And did the nightmares Occhino had before 9/11 presage that disaster or were the connections only apparent in retrospect? Whatever basis psychic phenomena may have in reality, there's no denying their profound emotional impact on the author--and in her plain prose, the author does justice to that impact.