Lead Review

• Book: A Million Heavens
• Location: Albuquerque
• Author: John Brandon

The book’s gamble is that its panoply of fractured lives, mundane problems and simmering hopes will, when sprinkled with fairy dust, give rise to intersecting moments of transcendence, that its orchestra of minor notes will crescendo and peak. And the book’s two biggest moments – one coming midway, the other at its end – are wondrous. Unexpected threads overlapped, the magic dust was properly shimmery and I had to stop reading to actually pace, marveling at what one writer can imagine, what a novel is capable of holding.

But two magical scenes don’t equal a magical novel. Too many sentences in “A Million Heavens” tap a bit too deeply into New Mexico’s mystical, new-agey chakra, crossing the line from sincere to earnest (“The wolf wanted to believe that every last hope for peace had not expired in him”), or from earnest to precious (“He was a single note and he only wanted to ring”). NY Times

Back to book