The High Heaven
The world transforms around a strange, charismatic girl who was trained to keep her eyes on the skies in the bizarre, wondrous novel The High Heaven.
Orphaned when the cult she was raised in went out to meet alien angels and instead clashed with government agents, Izzy was rescued by Maude and Oliver, postwar ranchers eking out an existence on land coveted by NASA and abutted by a movie studio. A further clash, followed by Oliver’s last heroic act, left her alone once more.
With the cult’s Bible verses still pulsing through her, Izzy spent the next decades in flux. Rootless sans official identification documents, she found work waitressing, prospecting for “alien minerals,” and concocting schemes. She fell in love, experimented with drugs, and swilled gin; she grew marijuana on unplotted land; she found work at a theme park. In her final iteration, she became a New Orleans social worker, moonlighting as a therapist for the moonless. For Izzy, moonshots, from the Apollo missions to Artemis plans, were the only constant—a source of hope, terror, and metamorphosis.
The story spans a period of seventy-seven years, representing momentous historical and technological changes. It begins with a monkey’s maybe death in a test rocket and ends with the possibility of Moon colonization. Such moments are attended to in unnerving but captivating prose that captures sharp cultural shifts with rockabilly lyricism. Izzy, with her electric green eyes and uncertain past and future, attracts likewise singular characters, from a kyphotic fortune teller to a haunted soldier. She brings all whom she encounters danger and enlightenment by turns, ushering each, by sheer force of her singularity, toward “a gentle place where the pain is mostly gone.”
The High Heaven is a marvelous novel in which the unchartable wonders of the universe are filtered through the experiences of a special girl.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
