Customer Reviews

All We Know of Heaven: A Novel

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have read and reviewed many books over the past two years that have impressed me. I have read only a handful, however, that have touched me as deeply as ALL WE KNOW OF HEAVEN. This is a book that's hard to describe in detail, due mainly to the fact that I don't want to give too much of the story away. Suffice it to say, however, that it's a story that will stay with you long after you've turned the last page.

Two girls, Bridget and Maureen, who are so similar and yet so different at the same time. They have nearly identical body shapes, have the same colored hair and eyes, and even share many of the same mannerisms and characteristics. They've been best friends for several years, and yet there's a part of Maureen that understands that Bridget considers her to be her friend out of convenience, and for what she can provide for her.

Then there is an accident, a deadly one, and the lives of two girls and their families are forever changed. One girl dies, one girl lives. One family buries their daughter, one rejoices and yet fears over the fact that their daughter, now forever changed, lies unconscious and unknowing in a hospitable bed. Yet through it all, interspersed throughout the pages of the story, are the tangled thoughts of a young woman, who is unable to grasp even the simplest words and put them to the images she sees, yet who understands the concept that she's not the girl everyone seems to think she is.

The wrong daughter buried, the wrong family rejoicing. Fear, regret, heartbreak, happiness, hope -- and with it all, through it all, tinged by it all, lies guilt. Guilt that one girl survived, and one didn't. Guilt that one mother once hoped her daughter might die, to spare them all the pain of a long recovery. Guilt that one family's prayers seemed to be answered, and another's joy was cut short.

Guilt that one girl is not the other, could never be the other, and yet seems to be stepping into the life that girl left behind.

Jacquelyn Mitchard can write. She writes so well, in fact, that the reader is unable to step outside of the story of Maureen and Bridget once they've begun reading it. You can feel the pain, the happiness, the sorrow. You understand, and you grieve, and you rejoice, right along with the characters of ALL WE KNOW OF HEAVEN. This is a story you won't soon forget -- nor will you want to.

Reviewed by: Jennifer Wardrip, aka "The Genius"

First off, I wish I could give 2 1/2 stars because I feel equally divided on this book. I agree with those who say the first half was good and the second half wasn't as good.

The first half was very well written and I especially liked being "inside" Maureen's mind as she tried to find her words and tried to figure out what was happening to her. The hospital stay and her rehabilitation in the hospital were so touching.

I had a problem when she left the hospital. The love story between Bridget's boyfriend and Maureen was too contrived. It absolutely did not belong in this book. I would have rather seen him as a strong friend figure who helped Maureen deal with the loss of her best friend. I also hated the Flannery's disgusting behavior towards Maureen for living. Maureen didn't kill Bridget, it was an accident and their anger was grossly misguided. It just didn't sit well with me at all.

I guess the second half was so disappointing to me because I had followed the Cerak/Van Ryn case and read the book. I was so drawn to their story because of the way the two families banded together in the end. They were so inspirational and their behavior was beautiful and I guess I would have rather seen that in this book than the bullying that took place instead.

As one of the other critical review stated, this book was definitely too rushed in the second half. I liked the first half a lot; the similarities between the story and the Whitney Cerak/Laura Van Ryn true-life story were definitely obvious, but not problematically so. The parts with Maureen emerging from her coma are touching and well-written, as is the reveal of the mistaken identity. Once Maureen is out of the hospital, the book goes downhill fast. It hops from today to a year from now to six months later to... you get the idea. The author tries to cover too much time, with too little detail, in too few pages.

I didn't think the "love story" was a necessary addition to the book. I'm sure the reader is supposed to believe Danny when he insists that maybe he was in love with Maureen all along, but I certainly couldn't buy into that idea. One day he's waiting anxiously for the girl he believes to be his longtime girlfriend to awaken, the next day she's awake and not the girlfriend - so he's immediately just as much in love with Maureen as he was with Bridget. It's not believable. I don't blame the characters who accused him of using Maureen as his Bridget substitute, because that's exactly what happens.

I also didn't care for the use of dozens of characters who appeared once or twice then never again, giving us little sense of who is and isn't important in the main characters' lives. One girl is set up as a villain at the beginning, then basically vanishes for the rest of the book. The family members, with the exception of the girls' parents, are virtual strangers to us from beginning to end. I would have much rather had fewer characters and much more character development.

Overall, the book would have been much stronger if we'd learned more about the girls and their friendship before the accident and seen more of Maureen's struggle to cope with the loss of the friendship afterward. As it is, we don't know much about them before the accident, and Maureen seems to seamlessly slip into her deceased friend's role with a definite minimum of grieving and loss. I'm sure there are elements to the Cerak/Van Ryn story that the general public didn't see, but it seems to be a cheapening of their tragedy to basically retell the story but with more emphasis on the "love story" than the loss and learning to live again.

I never could quite get over the fact that this was so obviously based on the real life story. There were just so many resemblances to the true story. I read the true story and I was very impressed with the way the two families displayed such amazing grace and compassion in the face of unimaginable loss. In this book, everyone seems to give in to their darker impulses and it makes for a bit of a melodramatic story. I understand that the mistaken identity scenario is a bit symbolic of the way the survivor is trying to carve out her own identity after a lifetime of being known as her best friend's look-alike friend. The thing is, she carves out this new identity for herself by sleeping with her dead friend's boyfriend. The sexuality in this book really bothered me. If the book had portrayed teen sexuality honestly, that would be one thing. But I was never given anything more than a superficial insight into why the characters would sleep around with each other and what it really meant for them. It all felt too rushed. I didn't really connect with any of the characters. I did like the sections that were from the girl's point of view as she was emerging from her coma. There were some genuinely touching moments. But overall, it left me feeling kinda hollow. There was the mistaken identity plotline which was way too reminiscent of the real story, and as a result, I wasn't able to suspend my disbelief. And then there was the love story that didn't feel like it was as developed as it should have been. Maybe because the characters all felt like shadowy people who were placed in this ready-made plotline with a little love story on the side.

The ending felt too neatly wrapped up. And yet the story's central dilemma doesn't feel like it's actually been resolved, mainly because I didn't know what, exactly, the characters wanted. At the end of the book, it seems that what the girl wants is the boy. You know---girl wants boy, girl gets boy, girl loses boy, etc., etc. But this doesn't feel connected to the mistaken identity plotline. So it feels like there's two plotlines in here. One involves the slow healing process and the other involves a weird love triangle gone wrong. Neither plotline reveals anything significant about the human condition, other than the fact that human beings can be sneaky and creepy to each other and, ultimately, human beings are survivors. But I expected more from this story than an acknowlegment of something I already know. And as for the girl finding her identity, I really don't think she did, except through her adolescent boyfriend.

So yeah, this book didn't offer me much. Maybe I didn't get it. But I hope what I've said makes some sense.

I also found the writing to be problematic in places. There were awkward point of view shifts and the occasional shift in time that felt too rushed. And there were all these characters coming and going. Occasionally, a character would show up in a scene out of nowhere and I would wonder who he was. That happened at least once.

This had a lot of potential but it didn't live up to the promise for me. I'll still go on to read other Mitchard books but I was disappointed in this one.

I finished ALL WE KNOW OF HEAVEN last night and it's been on my mind all day today. What I find intriguing is that it's been packaged as a YA novel when I think it's a wonderful novel for all ages.

Jacquelyn Mitchard has the innate and rare gift of knowing how to tell a story well. With seamless skill, she introduces readers to two young girls who could easily live in your own neighborhood, then she grabs you by the throat and takes you on an up/down roller coaster ride that will leave you flipping the pages well into the night. I can't see how anyone could read this novel and NOT think about the characters and what they went through for days and months to come.

I liked this book, but didn't love it. It was written for teens but I thought it was inappropriate for teens. Too much hate, selfishness, sex. I was interested in this story because I remember seeing the families of 2 girls who got mixed up on TV a few years back and it really seemed unbelievable.
I didn't like how the author made a lot of people mean to Maury. I suppose this kind of thing can happen, but it's just too horribly unthinkable for me. I also found the Danny-Maury thing to be kind of creepy.
Overall it was interesting and I liked it. I'd love to read the true story it was inspired by, but unfortunately I heard it was very in-your-face Christian.

After reading this book--in less than 24 hours, I might add, which is something I stopped doing more than a decade ago--I was stunned to learned the "brick and mortar" stores were shelving it as YA. What are they thinking? The protagonist may be 16, but the themes--Who are we? Is our identity related to our ability or our outward appearance, or, as Mitchard seems to be saying, are we defined by the choices we make when tragedy strikes and we have to pick up the bits and pieces to find ourselves in what we have left?--make it appropriate to an adult audience, as well.

The story is fascinating. Entirely fiction, it is inspired by a case of mistaken identity after two teens who looked almost identical were injured in an car crash. When some months after the accident, the living teen awoke from her coma and the mistake was caught, one family's grief turned to joy but the other family's hopes were suddenly dashed, and the town found itself grieving all over gain. Mitchard sets clever clues for the reader in the first chapter, then makes them wait for those around the hospitalized girl to figure out the truth. Once they do, the story is far from over--Mitchard is just getting warmed up, and with equal control, she takes the reader on a roller-coaster journey through what lies ahead. This ability to tell a story, first demonstrated in the bestseller THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN, sets Mitchard apart from other authors, and to my mind, this is her best book yet as she grapples with the issue of what it means to be disabled and how it feels from the person who's struggling to cope with handicaps others don't have to face. Let me tell you, as someone who's worked closely with the brain injured in the past, Ms. Mitchard nails it!

All the characters are rich and well-developed in this story, which is the kind I envision becoming a "major motion picture"--the sort that gives rise to multiple best actor/actress and supporting actor/actress nominations. It should become a classic; it's worth reading again and again.

Ever since I read "The Most Wanted" years ago I've been in love with Jacquelyn Mitchard's writing style. Her use of words and sentence structure to convey atmosphere, her excellently constructed complex human relationships and maybe most of all-the way she portrays teenagers as real people in their own light-as adults who are just undergoing a lot of change. There's a real sense of respect for her younger characters and as a teenager I just adored her for it. It can be frustrating when in adult novels teens come off as lesser beings.

I'm not a teenager anymore and "All we know of Heaven" isn't one of Mitchard's adult novels but one I read about the plot I couldn't resist it. Based on a real life accident that occurred some years ago this book is the story of two best friends, Bridget and Maureen. Bridge and Maury live across the street from each other and do everything together. They even look alike and are the same height and weight-and have the same body type thanks to their cheerleading. So when the girls are in a horrific car accident and mangled almost beyond recognition they're identified by who was sitting in what seat in the car-Maureen's car.

The driver dies. The passenger lives, but is in a coma and horribly damaged. And everyone thinks they know what's going on when all of a sudden the passenger wakes up.

And she's not Bridget.

The case of mistaken identity stirs everything up. One set of parents is elated, the other broken. Friends are confused. And Danny, Bridget's boyfriend and Maureen's friend doesn't know what to think. Maureen is physically, emotionally and mentally damaged, terrified, angry and hungry for life all at once. We watch, as over the course of two years Maureen, and the whole community, struggle to get back to their new normal.

This is a really fantastic novel. It's a story of tragedy and hope, renewal and death, romance, growth and forgiveness. And strength most of all. I've never read a book where so many difficult emotions were portrayed so clearly and vividly. The grief of the families and friends, joy mixed with sorrow, hatred, love...it's all there. And it's so wonderful-the characters are so vivid they might be right in front of you telling you their story. Be prepared to cry.

My reasons for loving Jacquelyn Mitchard still hold true. Teen or adult, it doesn't matter. I think I'd read anything she wrote.

Five stars.

Jacquelyn Mitchard has created another beautifully written, heartbreaking story. Maureen and Bridget are practically sisters, having grown up together and being best friends. When a car accident kills one of them and leaves the other in a coma, everyone mourns Maureen and prays for Bridget's recovery. Until they find out that Bridget is the one who died and Maureen is in the coma.

More than once, this book had me in tears. Maureen's story (and it's Bridget's too) is heartbreaking, but hopeful.

wonderful characters, great story
If only real life could be so tidy at the end!