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Book Reviewed by:Transporting the reader between a richly detailed past and a frighteningly possible future, The Heavens is a powerful reminder of the consequences of our actions, a poignant testament to how the people we love are destined to change, and a masterful exploration of the power of dreams.
New York, late summer, 2000. A party in a spacious Manhattan apartment, hosted by a wealthy young activist. Dozens of idealistic twenty-somethings have impassioned conversations over takeout dumplings and champagne. The evening shines with the heady optimism of a progressive new millennium. A young man, Ben, meets a young woman, Kate - and they begin to fall in love.
From their first meeting, Ben knows Kate is unworldly and fanciful, so at first he isn't that concerned when she tells him about the recurring dream she's had since childhood. In the dream, she's transported to the past, where she lives a second life as Emilia, the mistress of a nobleman in Elizabethan England.
But for Kate, the dream becomes increasingly real and compelling until it threatens to overwhelm her life. And soon she's waking from it to find the world changed - pictures on her wall she doesn't recognize, new buildings in the neighborhood that have sprung up overnight. As she tries to make sense of what's happening, Ben worries the woman he's fallen in love with is losing her grip on reality.
The Heavens is the kind of novel that almost demands multiple readings, and certainly merits intense discussion. Newman raises questions about the kinds of stories we tell, about the (perhaps dangerous) human tendency to cast ourselves as the heroes of the stories we inhabit, about whether the human condition is evolving for the better…or otherwise. It's also a masterful and heart-rending novel of 9/11, one that takes an entirely different approach to telling that familiar story, placing it in the context of a seemingly unrelated historical context that nevertheless makes perfect sense...continued
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(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
The Heavens is not an easy novel to categorize, but on at least one level, it participates in a category of fantasy literature called a "time-slip" novel, in which a character travels between two or more separate timelines. The mechanism for the shift in time varies, but can be reading letters, doing research, traveling through a doorway or portal – or falling asleep and dreaming. Here are a few other notable time-slip novels:
The Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
In this novel, an archaeological dig in modern-day France offers a connection to a secret buried nearly a millennium before.
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
This popular historical romance (also an equally popular television series) finds a 20th century woman transported two ...
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Adam Foulds, author of The Quickening Maze
Unique and brilliant, I tore through The Heavens and I loved it. It is a house made of trapdoors, where dreams are real and reality a dream. Through this strange labyrinth of 21st century New York and Renaissance England, it is love which deftly, movingly, finds the way.
