An engaging, lighthearted, and thought-provoking fantasy about what heaven is really like.
A debut novel focuses on a journey through the Christian heaven.
At the beginning of Domexa’s book, Mitch Campbell and his mother die in a car crash in July 2015 during rush-hour traffic in West Palm Beach, Florida. As the tale unfolds, Mitch is telling readers his story from heaven. Two months earlier, he had lost his brother, Edmund, in a random shooting. Edmund is just one of the many people Mitch encounters in paradise. There is also the flamboyant Flannighans L. Molard, a gay man who sometimes sold marijuana (apparently something Mitch considers a surefire barrier to salvation). Molard’s presence surprises Mitch, who’s still operating under his previously held ideas of what a person needs to do to gain entry into heaven. “According to popular belief,” he reflects, “if you don’t go to church every Sunday, pray as hard as prophet Elijah, pay one tenth of every hard dollar you’ve earned, make pledge to charities, and never kill mosquitos, some pastors say you’re not going” to paradise. The more Mitch learns of heaven, the more he realizes the errors of those old ideas—although the process is very gradual despite all the religious and philosophical elaborations he hears from everybody there. “Mankind,” he’s told at one point, places “so much emphasis on sex, murder, and homosexuality as if these were the ultimate sins for which redemption seems almost inapplicable, while little lies, resentment, manipulation, selfishness, trifling and hypocrisy thrive among them.” Domexa’s writing style is relaxed and inviting, and his humor (particularly regarding Mitch’s formidable mother) shines through in most sections. Furthermore, Mitch’s eventful odyssey should spark some lively discussions. But the author’s decision to make his version of heaven essentially West Palm Beach with limitless buffets will strike some readers as a bit ridiculous. There are French mansions, well-trimmed hedges, and Persian rugs, and readers are told that “most things” are made of “cherry, oak, walnut trees, gemstones and bamboo.” Fortunately, this element serves the narrative’s deeper purpose of putting a very human face on eternity.
An engaging, lighthearted, and thought-provoking fantasy about what heaven is really like.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77523-240-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: Zeeks Publishing Inc.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.
Walker (In Love and Trouble, Meridian) has set herself the task of an epistolary novel—and she scores strongly with it.
The time is in the Thirties; a young, black, Southern woman named Celie is the primary correspondent (God being her usual addressee); and the life described in her letters is one of almost impossible grimness. While young, Celie is raped by a stepfather. (Even worse, she believes him to be her real father.) She's made to bear two children that are then taken away from her. She's married off without her consent to an older man, Albert, who'd rather have Celie's sister Nettie—and, by sacrificing her body to Albert without love or feeling, Celie saves her sister, making it possible for her to escape: soon Nettle goes to Africa to work as a Christian missionary. Eventually, then, halfway through the book, as Celie's sub-literate dialect letters to God continue to mount (eventually achieving the naturalness and intensity of music, equal in beauty to Eudora Welty's early dialect stories), letters from Nettie in Africa begin to arrive. But Celie doesn't see them—because Albert holds them back from her. And it's only when Celie finds an unlikely redeemer—Albert's blues-singer lover Shug Avery—that her isolation ends: Shug takes Celie under her wing, becomes Celie's lover as well as Albert's; Shug's strength and expansiveness and wisdom finally free up Nettie's letters—thus granting poor Celie a tangible life in the now (Shug's love, encouragement) as well as a family life, a past (Nettie's letters). Walker fashions this book beautifully—with each of Celie's letters slowly adding to her independence (the implicit feminism won't surprise Walker's readers), with each letter deepening the rich, almost folk-tale-ish sense of story here. And, like an inverted pyramid, the novel thus builds itself up broadeningly while balanced on the frailest imaginable single point: the indestructibility—and battered-ness—of love.
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.Pub Date: June 28, 1982
ISBN: 0151191549
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
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Twenty-six tales by the 1982 Nobel Prize Winner, rearranged in roughly chronological order of writing. From the 1968 collection No One Writes to the Colonel come stories of the town of Macondo—about the much-delayed funeral of local sovereign Big Mamma, a dentist's revenge on the corrupt Mayor (extraction sans anesthetic), a priest who sees the Devil, a thief who robs the pool hall of its billiard balls. But the collection's standout—its title novella—is not included here. Likewise, the long title piece from the Leaf Storm collection (1972)—also about a Colonel—is omitted; but it does offer "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" and other beguiling fantasies. And, from 1978's Innocent Erendira And Other Stories comes an uneven mix of mystical fable and diffuse surrealism (some pieces dating, before English translation, from the 1940s or '50s). Much that's brilliant, some that's merely strange and fragmentary, and almost all enhanced by the translations of Gregory Rabassa and S. J. Bernstein.
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1984
ISBN: 0060932686
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1984
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