A Million Heavens

As promised, here is a post about one of the excellent books I read in 2012.

The cover art of A MILLION HEAVENS is a little dark, and the title is hopeful. The combination intrigued me.

The back cover describes a small town in New Mexico in which townspeople participate in a weekly vigil.

        

The first character we meet is a wolf. We first see the wolf as he makes his rounds in this small desert town. The wolf knows that the humans gather. The wolf does not know that the humans gather in vigil because a young boy lies in a coma.

At first it seems as though the book is primarily about the boy's coma and those connected to the vigil. We meet many of the town's inhabitants, some who vigil and some who don't. We meet the boy's father, a gas station owner, the mayor. We even meet a dead man. Everyone has their own motivations.

In the beginning of the book, the author homes in on each of the characters, training his authorial eye on each of the characters separately, as though looking at them from afar through a telescope. Gradually the stories of these seemingly random characters coalesce, and as the book evolves into a story of a town and its inhabitants, we become enveloped in the world of this little town. I love how Brandon did this .

One of my former co-workers (blauthor of Books N Bits blog) LOVES McSweeney's, their publication and their books. I am taking a page out of his playbook and recommending this great McSweeney's title.

Clicking on the book cover will take you to Amazon's web page for the book. Clicking on the underlined title may take you to Barnes and Noble's page for the book. Purchasing through these links helps support the blog. You can send us email: 2of3Rs(AT)gmail(DOT)com. Thank you for stopping by!