Book Review – “the five people you meet in heaven”

On to the review.

Review: “the five people you meet in heaven”, Mitch Albom

“The Three Reasons you don’t read this book on Earth”

Firstly, for those lucky ones who searched the Web seeing any reviews of this “#1 MEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER” book – with rave reviews by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, People, Boston Globe, Atlanta Journal-Constitution – you are indeed lucky. In the following review, I’ll be giving you 3 solid reasons why this is a tragedy of literary tragedy, and perhaps convince your now-doubtful mind why you shouldn’t read this book.

Reason Number 3

Firstly, let’s establish some stuff in this book here, so we’ll get more familiarised with this text. It begins with “The End”, with the objectives of promoting psuedo-interest in a book that is a “#1 MEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER”. Therefore I find beyond just fairness to start with the end as well! Here’s what happens:

1. This maintenance guy called Eddie dies from saving a girl.
2. He meets a Blue Man, whom Eddie indirectly killed from an unfortunate twist of events.
3. He meets his Captain in the army, who shot his leg to save his life. (He was actually distracted by some moving object in enemy fire, and the Captain did that to bring him back to safety)
4. He meets Ruby, whose husband built Ruby Pier, which Eddie worked in. (This was the most complicated and convoluted of the lot. It talked much about why Eddie had to forgive his father who had abused him. Don’t ask me why, ask Albom.)
5. He meets his wife (whom he dearly loved), Marguerite, and they relived their moments talking lots and finally dancing. (*she disappears with a poof after that)
6. He meets the Moving Object in Fire (MOF), as mentioned in point 3, who is horribly burnt by the fire which he helped set ablaze.
7. Albom ends here, and he returns “home” to the Ferris Wheel and embraces his wife who was waiting with her arms extended”.

Reason Number One

Are you familiar with that itchy feeling? You sit on a train, miss your stop, then just as you wake up and your eyes open and you swerve your neck towards the station and then you gasp in horror, you find yourself missing one entire stop. When you take rides along the countryside, you know precisely what I’d feel. You’ll sit on the train, firstly showering and then deluging yourself with pity for missing it in the first place, no, for sleeping. Why did I sleep? Then this feeling transforms into absolute, complete, distilled, full-fledged boredom.

I don’t want you to regret your choices. After you plough through about 1/4 of this book, you feel like crying. You feel bad. You feel like you made such a terrible mistake, you’d really want to get to the W.C. and get it out of your system. (If you were on that train, you’d get a siphon and plug it into the guy sitting next to you.)

See, you can’t. It’s the trap. It’s a “#1 MEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER”, and therefore, you must conclude, it is good. All Americans have an acute literary sense, because there is no such thing as “toppling dominoes” over there in a free society.

Hence you continue. It progresses quickly into boredom. All-inclusive, all-embracing, utter, whole boredom. I can’t find a more fitting word. How about the storyline then, you ask? Boredom about what? I’ll answer in the next two reasons.

“Albom has the ability to make you cry in spite of yourself.”

- Boston Globe

“No wonder. Tears of boredom.”

- yourstruly

Reason Number Two

Energy bars, especially those made up of many “grains” and are “packed with fibre”, are nice when they have a little flavour – fruity or otherwise – and have some ability to stick together. When you take a bite, you’d like bars which are crunchy, is a little wet, and doesn’t mess up the place, since these are convenience snacks which you want to “grab and go”. It is painful sometimes when I eat some bars close to expiry dates… they crumble the moment my teeth bite into them, and they never fail to leave a dry, biting sensation.

Like this “#1 MEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER”.

It is like adding corms to your feet – which isn’t an exactly pleasant experience. Why? Because it’s storyline and plot is too diverse. The character, Eddie, is known to have a diminished character, after all his set backs in life. I can quite effectively summarise his general inner person to be that of a small candle flame dancing in the wind. Yet, the other characters weren’t developed properly, much less good. I was a little disappointed after I finished the book; if these people had played such crucial roles in his life, how could Albom merely talk about the relationships they share, blatantly ignoring the fact that these people were just as important in their own right?

Perhaps Albom wants it to enter a complex here, because he’d argue that that’s precisely his point. The human race has become so huge, its inter-connections are innumerable; hence, if Albom were to explain in vague detail WHO these 5 persons were and WHAT they were doing in his life, that’s be great. If not, it’ll flop. Which it does.

Besides, if he says that every thing is interconnected, then he has contradicted himself. He should instead claim that these were the 5 most important people he met in heaven. (Which he didn’t)

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So there you are.