Summary
This book begins in the same way as the first book did: with a countdown to the death of the protagonist. This time, we follow Annie, the little girl who Eddie saved back in the first book. Turns out, although her life was saved, her hand was chopped off by debris and had to be reattached.
Now she has grown up and is getting married to her childhood love, Paulo. At her marriage, Annie sees a man that she vaguely recognises, but can’t remember who he is. As Paulo and Annie drive to a hotel in their limousine, rain begins to pour and they see a man at the side of the road, trying to fix a tire. Paulo asks the limousine driver to stop and he gets out of the vehicle to help the poor man in the rain. That man, Tolbert, tells them that he owns a hot-air balloon tour service. As they are fixing the tire, Paulo almost gets hit by a passing car but is saved by Tolbert, who pulls him out of the way just in time. Before they leave, Tolbert hands them his name card and thanks them for their help. Annie remarks about them starting off their marriage with a good deed.
That night, Annie proposes that they take a hot-air balloon ride the next morning to celebrate their wedding.
The next day, they take a hot-air balloon ride with Teddy, Tolbert’s assistant. This is because Tolbert was out to fix his car after the incident the previous day. Turns out, Teddy isn’t a very experienced hot-air balloon pilot and forgot to check the weather before flying.
Long story short, they crash into telephone cables due to bad weather and bad flying. Paulo throws Annie out of the balloon in an attempt to protect her from the crash and he ends up falling out and hurting himself really badly.
With Paulo’s lung punctured, Annie decides to transplant her lung to try and save his life. The next thing she knows, she’s in heaven. Oh shit.
Here we go again, you know the deal, she’s gonna meet five people in heaven now.
The first person she meets is a little boy named Sameer. Annie can’t recall ever meeting Sameer and Sameer shows her a scene of him as a little boy chasing a train. The little boy grabs onto the speeding train and his arm gets ripped right off his body. Eventually, he becomes the first person to have a limb reattached successfully. Sameer reveals that this led to new advancements in medicine and that eventually led to Annie being the first person to have her limb reattached with a new technique. He also reveals that he is the doctor that conducted the surgery to reattach her hand for her. The lesson he’s here to teach her is that “when we build, we build on the shoulders of those who came before us. And when we fall apart, those who came before us help put us back together.”
After he disappears, the next person she meets is an elderly woman, who she also doesn’t recognise.
It turns out that this person is her old dog, Cleo, in the form of an old woman. She teaches Annie about loneliness, because Annie frequently found herself feeling lonely because her mother cooped her up at home in an attempt to protect her. The lesson she teaches Annie is that loneliness is never permanent and loneliness disappears once someone needs you, and the world is so full of need, and that is why Cleo’s heaven is the perpetual moment of doggos greeting their owners when they came home, because the reuniting of souls gave her joy.
Annie yearns to find out whether she managed to save Paulo, but before she can receive an answer, Cleo disappears and she meets the next person, which happens to be her mother.
Annie doesn’t really like her mother. Afterall, this is the person who made her keep changing schools and preventing her from making friends in order to “protect” her. Annie recounts how she met Paulo in school and he was her only friend due to her hideous scar on her hand, but her mother tried to restrict their friendship. She recalls how after Paulo left the school to immigrate, she got in a relationship with another guy and left her mother to live with him for something like a year. When she came back home, she found out that her mother had been diagnosed with cancer.
Essentially, her mother takes the opportunity to reveal all the secrets she had hidden from Annie, including what happened on the day that Annie’s hand was chopped off. Annie was at the beach with her boyfriend, but she had the revelation that she was only dating so many guys because she felt like she wasn’t loved after getting divorced and wanted to find a way to feel loved again. She realises that she doesn’t need love from another guy, and that all she needs to do is to love her daughter. She dumps the guy at this point and runs back to her daughter, just in time to see the ambulance leaving the scene.
Her mother also reveals that they left the hospital and moved to another state not because of the media hounding them, as Annie assumed, but because her mother had received a court order from Annie’s father, demanding that custody of Annie be handed over to him because of the accident. Annie’s mother also says that she was only so overprotective of Annie because she felt so guilty for the accident and she never wanted her daughter to get hurt ever again.
Annie also reveals a secret that she kept from her mother, which is that the year Annie left with her then boyfriend, she got pregnant and married her then boyfriend, basically a shotgun wedding. It led to a stillborn child, and it broke Annie that her child passed away like that, and she got a divorce and that’s why she came back home, only to find out that her mother was dying.
Annie and her mother reconcile, with both of them saying that they did love each other, even though they did not act like they did. The lesson Annie learns here is apparently forgiveness, but I feel like this lesson was a bit unclear and this chapter seemed to talk more about how children eventually grow into their parents and how when parents punish themselves for their own mistakes, they end up punishing their children too.
Anyways, the next person Annie meets is Eddie, the guy that saved her all those years ago. Annie doesn’t really recall how the accident occurred, possibly because she shut the traumatic memory out as a child. Now, she tells Eddie all about how the accident ruined her life and Eddie basically recaps the first book for her, and explains how he also felt plagued by the guilt of killing Tala, just like how Annie feels guilt for killing Eddie, even though she doesn’t remember how Eddie died. Eddie then shows her what happened the day of the accident, and she becomes even more guilt-ridden. Eddie tells her that she needs to let go of that guilt because his death allowed him to atone for his sin of killing Tala, and that Eddie saving Annie did lead to a positive consequence. He then hands a baby over to her. At this point, I thought this baby was the child that was stillborn, because as soon as Eddie disappears, the baby disappears too, leaving Annie alone again.
I kind of expected Eddie to be the last person Annie would meet in heaven, so when he turned out to be the fourth person, I kind of expected the fifth person already, but it was still a good plot twist in the end.
The fifth person Annie meets in heaven is Paulo.
She tells him that he wasn’t supposed to die, and she was supposed to save him, but he says that she still has lots of good to do in the world, and gives her a heart made out of pipe cleaners, which merges into her own heart, and he says that he’ll be seeing her again soon.
She comes back alive, and later realises that she had gotten pregnant the night of the wedding, and that this was the child Eddie had shown her in heaven. She finally manages to come to terms with her past and forgives Tolbert, as well as promises to do her best to be a good mother to her and Paulo’s child.
How I Found The Book
After reading The Five People You Meet in Heaven, I have never picked up the sequel to a book this fast. I went to search for Mitch Albom’s bibliography, and when I saw this book, I knew I wanted to read it, especially after how good the first book was. I was half expecting the sequel to never be able to top the first book, but I think this one really did.
Quotes from the Book
“When we build, we build on the shoulders of those who came before us. And when we fall apart, those who came before us help put us back together.”
“Children begin by needing their parents. Over time, they reject them. Eventually, they become them.”
“This is the disarming power of children: their need makes you forget your own.”
“First loves often remain in the heart, like plants that cannot grow in sunlight.”
“You realize, once you die, that a funeral is for everyone else, not you.”
“And while she didn’t know it then, she was learning another truth about love: it comes when it comes. Simple as that.”
Key Learning Points
- We should be grateful to those who came before us for bringing us to where we are now, and we should be grateful for those around us for helping us whenever we fail.
- Loneliness disappears when you help or contribute to someone else’s needs.
- Parenting is hard. Children will often end up disliking their parents, until they themselves realise the sacrifices needed to become a parent.
- You need to learn to forgive yourself for your past mistakes eventually, or it will only hurt you more.
- Love comes when it comes.
My Thoughts On The Book
I think this is the first book I managed to complete reading in the same day.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a sequel that manages to build on the central concept of the first book as well as twist it on its head so well before.
Some parts of the book were quite similar to the first book. The first three people both protagonists meet in heaven were quite similar, and I think it made the story a bit dry, because the lessons felt too similar, but the plot twist in the end of Paulo being the fifth person she meets in heaven was a brilliant twist on the plot of the first book, with Eddie realising that he did manage to save Annie, while here, Annie realises she did not manage to save Paulo, but Paulo revives her instead. The ending was honestly quite tear-jerking for me (EVEN THOUGH I DID NOT ACTUALLY CRY), and I think this book honestly was a great sequel and reiterated some concepts and lessons from the first book, while also maintaining a fresh story.
