Summary
The book’s about this guy, Eddie, who was apparently based on the author’s real uncle, also named Eddie.
Eddie’s a maintenance worker at Ruby Pier, which is a theme park, and he basically goes about his day, when a little girl asks him to make a little toy with pipe cleaners for her. Long story short, he dies after pushing the girl out of the way from a falling carriage from a ride.
He ends up in heaven, where he meets a man whose skin has gone blue. Turns out, that man was a circus freak who once worked at Ruby Pier, and the reason his skin turned blue was that he tried to ingest silver nitrate to calm his anxiety as a young man. When he came to work at Ruby Pier, he finally felt like he had a place where he could calm himself and be at ease, until one day, a little boy ran across the road to pick up a ball that had rolled onto the road. The Blue Man just happened to be practising his driving on that road and he swerved around the boy, avoiding catastrophe, but this gave him an anxiety attack, and he eventually swerved off the road again. That boy was Eddie, he just didn’t know it at the time. From this, the first lesson Eddie learns in heaven is that everyone is connected in some way, even if you don’t know it at the time. That’s why everyone who dies gets to meet five people in heaven who were connected to them in some way or another.
At this point, Eddie is still not at peace with himself, desperately asking whether he actually saved the girl he pushed, because he felt her hands pulling him just before he died.
The second person Eddie meets is his former military captain. They recall the memories of them being taken as prisoners of war in the Philippines, and how they managed to kill their captors, surprising them after enthralling them with Eddie’s juggling skills. The next thing they did was to use flamethrowers to burn down the entire village in which they were captured, assuming that it was already empty. That was when Eddie thought he saw a figure moving in a burning house. He fears that he has done something horrible. He rushes into the burning building, resisting his fellow soldiers who try to hold him back. That’s when he gets shot in the leg and blacks out. When he wakes up, he’s in a hospital and he assumes they were ambushed and his fellow soldiers rescued him. A while later, he hears that the Captain died in a military operation. Turns out, the Captain was the one who shot Eddie.
Eddie is pissed off and beats the shit out of the Captain, but they are in heaven so…
The Captain explains that he made a promise never to leave any man behind. In all his years of experience, he’s seen soldiers snap before, and that always cost them their lives. In Eddie’s case, the Captain thought Eddie had snapped too, and didn’t want him to die, and Eddie had already broken free from the hold of his fellow soldiers, so the Captain shot him in the leg. The soldiers later stole a vehicle from the village to escort Eddie and the Captain walked ahead of the vehicle to scout the surroundings. He stepped on a landmine and blew up into bits. The Captain teaches Eddie about loss and gain, showing how he lost his own life to gain the virtue of staying true to his promise and how Eddie lost his healthy leg to gain his own life. The Captain apologises to Eddie. Eddie forgives him.
Eddie continues to wonder whether the loss of his own life managed to allow that girl to gain the rest of her life.
The third person Eddie meets is Ruby. The woman which Ruby Pier was named after. She talks about Eddie’s father, and how he was always harsh on Eddie, even after coming back from the war. She shows him the incident of his father shouting at him to get a job and Eddie grabs his father’s hand, just as he tries to hit him. After that incident, they never spoke again. Ruby shows Eddie how his father died.
His father’s friend Mickey had just lost his job and was drunk. Mickey tried to rape Eddie’s mother as she was trying to contact Eddie’s father. Eddie’s father arrived just in time to chase Mickey out. The whole event traumatised the three of them. Mickey tried to commit suicide by falling into the sea. Eddie’s father arrived on the scene, ready to kill Mickey for what he tried to do to Eddie’s mother, but when he saw Mickey in the sea, he jumped in and saved him. He caught pneumonia from what he did that day, and died in hospital, after waking up one night and going to the window of his hospital ward, calling for Eddie, Eddie’s brother and Eddie’s mother. He died, leaning out of the window and the nurses, appalled at this sight, never spoke a word of it to anyone. Ruby tells Eddie to forgive his father for all the damage he did to Eddie has a child, just as Eddie’s father forgave Mickey for trying to rape his wife in that instant, leading to him dying out of loyalty to a friend.
Eddie breaks down and forgives his father.
The fourth person Eddie meets is his wife, Marguerite. Her heaven portrays wedding banquets of all different cultures and religions. They spend a long while together, reliving how they first meet and all the memories they shared together. Eddie finally gets to meet the love of his life again. He has so much he wants to tell her about all the years he spent alone, lost and without love. Eventually, his wife teaches him that even after death, love is never gone. She reveals she still felt his love for her even in heaven. They embrace one more time, and when Eddie opens his eyes again, she is gone.
It’s time for him to meet the next person.
The fifth person Eddie meets is a little Asian girl. At first I thought that this was the girl he pushed out of the way at the start, because she says that Eddie killed her, but she introduces herself as Tala, and shows him the night that he burned down an entire village again. She reveals she was the person he saw moving in the flames. Eddie can’t help but feel like he is a horrible person, and breaks down, unable to process this information. Tala, with her skin completely burnt, grabs Eddie’s hand, and asks him to wash her skin, which slowly leads to her burnt skin falling off, making her whole again. She tells him not to be consumed by his guilt of killing her, because he managed to atone for that everyday he worked at Ruby Pier, by entertaining and keeping children happy everyday. She tells him that his life wasn’t wasted and he had always been just where he was supposed to be. Eddie asks if he managed to save that girl, explaining he felt her pull on him just before he died. Tala reveals that it was her hands that pulled his soul to heaven. The girl is alive. The final lesson he learns is that every life has a purpose, even if you can’t see it yet.
In the end, he manages to make peace with himself over his life and his heaven is revealed to be the place where he first met Marguerite.
How I Found The Book
I saw the book at a Popular bookstore and remembered that I had read an excerpt of this book translated into Chinese before and found it interesting so I downloaded the English e-book version to read it properly. This is the first and only book that I ever read in Chinese before reading in English.
Key Learning Points
- We don’t live in bubbles. All our lives are connected in some way or another to each other, even if we don’t know it.
- When you lose something, you always gain something, even if you don’t know it yet.
- Holding anger in your heart only hurts yourself. Forgiving others is to release that anger from your heart.
- Love lives on even after death.
- Everything happens for a reason, even if we don’t see it yet, even if we don’t see it in our lifetime.
My Thoughts On The Book
I honestly loved this book a lot. I feel like the story was engaging, but not really tear-jerking. The lessons in this book were true life lessons though, not the kind that tells you what to do in life, but tells you how life is from a macro-perspective and leaves the rest to you to figure out. A lot of the book tells you something about life that may be hard for us to see because sometimes, we never find our purpose in life, even after we die. But I feel like just knowing that everyone’s lives are connected and all have a purpose and everyone we cross paths with is there for a reason gives a certain comfort in feeling that everything that happens in life happens for a reason, even if I can’t see it at this point in time, and perhaps will never be able to see the effects of it in my life. I’ve already read the sequel to this book, and I’ll do another book review of it, but that one made me tear up on the bus back home, and I honestly liked that book a bit more than this one, even though the concept, story and lessons of this book are already so beautiful.
To be honest, I think this would make for a great play. I can just see this story adapted for the stage and it would still be a heartwarming piece of theatre.
