Breakfast with Buddha (Merullo)

Book Reviews 
Please don't be put off when I describe this pleasant, engaging novel as a sermon. I admit I was put off during the first 50 pages or so, when I realized what I was in for, but I got to liking Breakfast with Buddha more and more as I went along and was very sorry when it ended.
Carolyn See - Washington Post

A laugh-out loud novel that’s both comical and wise…balancing irreverence with insight.
Louisville Courier-Journal

Insightful, amusing, loving…There are lovely moments of enlightenment that are not accompanied by angels with flaming swords; rather, there is that peaceful blue sphere that is available to all of us.
Seattle Times


Merullo, author of the Revere Beach series and Golfing with God, delivers a comic but winningly spiritual road-trip novel. Otto Ringling is a food-book editor and a happily married father of two living in a tony New York suburb. After Otto's North Dakota parents are killed in a car crash, he plans to drive his ebulliently New Age sister, Cecilia, back home to sell the family farm. But when Otto arrives to pick up Cecilia in Paterson, N.J. (where she does tarot readings and past-life regressions), she declares her intention to give her half of the farm to her guru, Volvo Rinpoche, who will set up a retreat there. Cecilia asks Otto to take Rinpoche to North Dakota instead; after a fit of skeptical rage in which he rails internally against his sister's gullibility, he accepts, and the novel is off and running. Merullo takes the reader through the small towns and byways of Midwestern America, which look unexpectedly alluring through Rinpoche's eyes. Well-fed Western secularist Otto is only half-aware that his life might need fixing, and his slow discovery of Rinpoche's nature, and his own, make for a satisfying read. A set piece of Otto's chaotic first meditation session is notably hilarious, and the whole book is breezy and affecting.
Publishers Weekly


With Breakfast with Buddha, Roland Merullo takes on one of the oldest and most popular literary genres—the road novel.... Despite the presence of a few mechanical scenes and characters, reviewers appreciated Merullo’s engaging writing style and his light and joyous treatment of what could have been very heavy-handed spiritual material.
Bookmarks Magazine


Veteran novelist Merullo continues the spiritual odyssey he began in Golfing with God (2005).... [and] using the lightest of touches, slowly turns this low-key comedy into a moving story of spiritual awakening.—Joanne Wilkinson
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