A Concise, Comforting Look at Heaven (The Five People You Meet in Heaven)

I have always wanted to read Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie but have somehow never gotten around to it (poor excuse, I know). My high school English teacher frequently talked about Albom so when I spotted a copy of his The Five People You Meet in Heaven I decided I owed it to her to give him a try.

Eddie is a lonely war veteran who dies saving a little girl from a falling cart. This novel is a look into his immediate afterlife and the five people he meets there. It theorises the premise that once we pass on, we will all meet our own five people (sometimes loved ones, sometimes strangers) who will explain our lives to us and show us just how connected we all are.

Both the writing and the argument reminded a lot of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones--another book I would highly recommend. The novel itself is fairly short, but it well-structured and beautifully written. Its message certainly resonated with me so I can only imagine how powerful and comforting it is for readers who recently lost loved ones.

This is yet another book that has been made into a film (or rather a TV movie), featuring Jon Voight and Jeff Daniels. But it looks to be quite a good adaptation as Albom wrote the teleplay and it scores quite highly (7.4) on IMDb.

I think I will force myself to 'get around' to Tuesdays with Morrie now. Albom is a gifted writer and his Heaven is one I would be quite comfortable going to one day.