The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Posted in: Book Worm on November 2, 2005 at 8:42 am by Glenn.
The Five People You Meet in Heaven
By Mitch Albom
Rating: 9/10
The back flap describes this book as: “an astoundingly original story that will change everything you’ve ever thought about the afterlife-and the meaning of our lives here on earth.” This is as accurate as a one-sentence review can be. The book is hard to describe as far as a single adjective. So I’ll just list some of the feelings and emotions that overwhelmed me as I turned each page, cherishing every word and just like some lives on earth, the book ended too soon.
Breathless, sad, depressed, enlightened, hopeful, fearful, guilty, drained, exhausted, thrilled, insecure, anxious, apprehensive, love, satisfaction, unsatisfied, longing, worried, confused, melancholy… the list can go on. I swear.
Mitch Albom wrote a very easily readable book of fiction that focuses on five people a man named “Eddie” meets in heaven. These five people can be symbols of those people we already know here on earth, they are symbols of lessons we should learn about ourselves and the outcome of our daily lives as well as our life after death. If you allow your emotions to let go, and allow possible barriers of your fear of death to pause, you can get some serious insight and personal reflection to reach unreachable depths of your soul. I’m reaching here. Really, I don’t know what to say. I JUST finished the book and put it down. Maybe I should have waited before writing this review but I had to say something.
Read this book. It may affect you in ways you never thought possible. Even if its just for a private moment.
The book is filled with lessons and hope.
Amazon.com review:
Part melodrama and part parable, Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven weaves together three stories, all told about the same man: 83-year-old Eddie, the head maintenance person at Ruby Point Amusement Park. As the novel opens, readers are told that Eddie, unsuspecting, is only minutes away from death as he goes about his typical business at the park. Albom then traces Eddie’s world through his tragic final moments, his funeral, and the ensuing days as friends clean out his apartment and adjust to life without him. In alternating sections, Albom flashes back to Eddie’s birthdays, telling his life story as a kind of progress report over candles and cake each year. And in the third and last thread of the novel, Albom follows Eddie into heaven where the maintenance man sequentially encounters five pivotal figures from his life (a la A Christmas Carol). Each person has been waiting for him in heaven, and, as Albom reveals, each life (and death) was woven into Eddie’s own in ways he never suspected. Each soul has a story to tell, a secret to reveal, and a lesson to share. Through them Eddie understands the meaning of his own life even as his arrival brings closure to theirs.
Albom takes a big risk with the novel; such a story can easily veer into the saccharine and preachy, and this one does in moments. But, for the most part, Albom’s telling remains poignant and is occasionally profound. Even with its flaws, The Five People You Meet in Heaven is a small, pure, and simple book that will find good company on a shelf next to It’s A Wonderful Life. –Patrick O’Kelley
