**WINNER, Inde Next General Book Award, General Fiction **WINNER, GOLD, Literary Classics, Fiction **WINNER, SILVER, Literary Classics, General Literature **WINNER, SILVER, Ben Franklin IBPA Award, Popular Fiction **FINALIST, InD'Tale Magazine, Rone Awards **HONORABLE MENTION, New England Book Festival awards **AWARDED, Literary Classics Seal of Approval What if you could choose your heaven now? Go on a celestial shopping trip of sorts? Thirty-five-year-old Vivienne does just that, as she lies dying in the ICU; a fatal walk into the path of a truck. In her final week of life, Vivienne treks through the Heavens of a priest, a best friend, a homeless child, and a lover who never was. Vivienne’s guardian angel, Noah, who may just be her soul mate, escorts her through selections of Heavens and through the confusion Vivienne experiences as she flounders between a doubt of life and the certainty of death. Although her visits to varied afterlives provide peace and beauty, choosing proves not so easy: Vivienne’s love for her young son and her earthly father pull her from her colorful journey—and from her divine love of Noah. The nature of love, the variety and magic of life, unending hope, and the importance of saying goodbye are central to this uplifting tale.
Author
My top 14 books of all time are as follows, in the following order—as in, if I was allowed only 14 books to bring to a deserted island where I was marooned for the rest of my life, these are what I would pack:
- Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabo)
- Orphan Master's Son (Adam Johnson)
- The Mummy Market (Nancy Brelis), tragically out of print, which makes ZERO sense because it's a classic
- The Incarnations (Susan Barker) AMAZING
- Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
- Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern)
- Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
- Swamplandia, and every single word ever written by: (Karen Russell)
- Everything is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer)
- The Keep, Jennifer Egan
- The Sea (John Banville)
- Someone Else's Love Story, Joshilyn Jackson.
- Kiss the Girls (Patterson)
- The Great Alone, Kristin Hannah Further to my literary likes, I consider Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Charles Dickens to be actual, literal geniuses; if we had brain scans of their brains, we wouldn't understand what we're seeing. I prefer more prose than dialogue; prefer poetry over intricate plot, but love if I can have both (hence, Love in the Time of Cholera being #1 and Orphan Master's Son #2). But I'm never really consistent with this anyway. If I'm pulled to keep reading the book, I'll keep reading the book. My reviews are all and will only ever be of books I love. I do not finish books I don't like, so it's not fair for me to review them.
