Rating: 7/10 The thing that struck me most about this book was the novelty of the premise. An old man, who was injured at war and who spent most of his life as a maintenance worker in an amusement park and consequently feels embittered and conscious of a wasted life, dies and goes to heaven. But heaven is not what one usually associates it with - a lovely place with young, beautiful people frolicking around. Instead, it comprises a collection of everyday places where the dead person meets five people who influenced his life significantly - these five could be familiar people or complete strangers and could even have affected his life in ways that he was never aware. The authour intersperses these meetings with events from different birthdays in the old man's life, that adds to the narration.
To the author's credit, his treatment of this basic premise does justice to it. The book is basically about these five meetings and how they help lay the demons in the old man's life to rest. At the end of it all, he understands the reasons for the key events in his life, he makes peace with people who he thought had wronged him, and most importantly, he understands the purpose of what he thought was a mundane existence. The book is a short one and a breezy read.
If the book had any faults in my view, it was the tendency to get descriptive with landscapes, etc. which distracts and irritates to an extent, but these descriptions are mercifully less in number.
Parts of this book will fall into the "cheesy" or "mushy" genre; if you get totally put out by that, this may not be the book for you. On the other hand, if you are the type who'd want to discuss with your spouse/friends over a bottle of wine who these five people in your life could be, you'd rate this 10 on 10. For me, this is a 7 on 10 and it works.
Pros: Innovative story, clever narrative style, feel-good ending, short and breezy read
Cons: Unnecessarily descriptive in some places, "cheesy" at times
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