In Albom’s hallmark storytelling brilliance, what happens in Annie’s afterlife reveals to her the parts of her time on earth that she had been missing and gives her an understanding she had longed for in her youth ... The twists and surprises here are reminders of just how unexpected and joyous life can be. As he has done before, Albom offers hope in a magical story of life and death and life again.
Annie, the little girl Eddie sacrificed his own life in order to save, has grown up ... As Annie learns her lessons about the meaning and value of both life and death, Albom wraps up this heartfelt fable with a totally unexpected twist. Order plenty of copies and warn readers to keep their hankies handy!
The Next Person is so packed with sweet aphorisms that it’s like scrolling through the Instagram account of a New Age masseuse ... What’s surprising about The Next Person You Meet in Heaven is how unmoving it remains, even during moments of horrible suffering. Cruel fathers, dead babies, severed limbs—these tragedies don’t catch at our heartstrings because, despite approaching the mysteries of life, death and salvation, the story always retreats into sentimentality, which can’t satisfy our most profound questions.
Reading The Next Person You Meet in Heaven, in 2018, is like watching a version of NBC’s moral philosophizing sitcom 'The Good Place' that has had every stitch of nuance and humor surgically excised ... The Next Person is blandly credulous. No truism undergoes examination; instead, Albom engineers a simulacrum of reality in which each tragedy has an equal and opposite silver lining, and in which life is lived in heroic gestures ... A fundamental coolness lies at the heart of Albom’s fiction, a vacancy where the beating human heart should be.
...Albom tells the story of Annie as she finds herself at the pearly gates and imparts five more lessons on readers from five more people. Albom’s readers will remember Annie as the child Eddie the maintenance worker saved from a grisly death in the first book, but his sacrifice didn’t do much to turn her luck around ... Just as Albom’s themes are rarely morally ambiguous, his prose style is also straightforward, though it’s surprisingly unsentimental. Newcomers to Albom might find his goodness cloying, but fans of the first book will have plenty to appreciate here.
This is a story about a woman named Annie, and it begins at the end, with Annie falling from the sky.' In this sequel to The Five People You Meet in Heaven, gruff Eddie the maintenance man gets to have a little chat with the aforementioned Annie, for whom he gave up his life in a freak roller-coaster accident in the first book, sparing her from death. So what’s she doing up in the afterlife? Well, it seems Annie has fallen in love, married, and then honored the event by going up in a hot air balloon...And now, thanks to high-tension wires, Annie has bitten the big one—or maybe not—and is wandering around in the clouds reliving past mistakes and holding self-discovery sessions with, yes, five of her predecessors in the dirt nap ... For those who prize fortune-cookie philosophy and sticky-sweet resolutions, this is just the ticket to ride.
