Is The Five People You Meet in Heaven a book for everyone?

    The Five People You Meet in Heaven is a book that focuses on very spiritual concepts and takes an imagination to be able to get something out of this book. As Eddie is meeting people in heaven it discuses how everyone of those people have crossed his path for a specific reason and contributed something to his life. This book touches upon fate, beliefs, hope, and faith. These are very controversial topics and many have different perspectives and opinions when it comes to these. Do you believe that everyone crosses your path for a reason? Do you think something positive can come out of dying? These are the questions that The Five People You Meet in Heaven bring to your attention, not everyone likes to think of these things especially for casual reading. Many people even may take offense to some these ideas expressed in the book about the after life if they go against their own personal beliefs.

Lessons Eddie learns

  I think this book is geared toward people who like to think while reading and are open minded to new ideas. This book is constantly throwing new concepts at you and is meant for someone who likes a book with a lot of meaning behind it. This book goes very in depth on Eddie's life and tries to prove to the readers and Eddie that his life did have a purpose. In order to do this it introduces the idea of meeting five people in heaven that were in his life for a reason. I think that book puts a good spin on heaven and its very interesting to see how simple things can alter our lives so much without us having any idea. For example, the third person Eddie met in heaven was a women named Ruby, he only seen a photograph of her because she had owned the Amusement Park he had devoted his whole life to working at. Little did Eddie know, Ruby had known Eddie's father before he passed away and had many things to share with Eddie about him. Someone Eddie never even met changed his whole entire life.

Eddie talking to Ruby

   Another thing this book focuses on is the physical appearance of heaven. In every chapter it gives a detailed description of what heaven looks like to Eddie. In the first paragraph it explains that Eddie has arrived at the after life in the Amusement park where he had spent his whole life. As the chapters go on it discusses the sky changing colors numerous times from white, to grey, to blue. The weather also changes with the colors form warm, to windy, to very cold. The seasons and colors foreshadow the event that's about to happen in that chapter, the good events usually had brighter colors and warmer weather, and the bad events in Eddie's life tend to have darker colors and rougher weather conditions. Do you think this was a coincidence or did the author purposely do this as an outlet to get his point across?
  All and all this book is extremely good and I think it could interest anyone from a wide variety of age groups, male and female. However, when reading a book that's predominately about heaven and dying, it is vital to keep an open mind and be wiling to take on a new understanding of things.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven compared to Tuedays With Morrie

   The Five People You Meet in Heaven starts off in Amusement park where an older man named Eddie is a maintenance worker, he spent the majority of his life working at Ruby Pier where he feels like his life is meaningless and wasted. On Eddie's 83rd birthday he begins his usual routine at Rubys Pier but then a malfunction occurs with one of the rides and Eddie looses his life to save a little girl. The book then takes you through Eddie's journey and experience in heaven where he realizes his life wasn't as meaningless as he thought.

   The Five people You Meet in Heaven has a very similar message to another book called Tuesdays With Morrie. In Tuesdays With Morrie it takes you through a mans final days of living, he spends his last days teaching a former student the importance and value of life and commonly says "once you learn how to die you will learn how to live." However, is dying something we can really be comfortable with? In Eddie's Journey in heaven one of the first things the book says is that "every hurt he'd ever suffered, every ache he'd ever endured- it was all gone as an expired breathe." Morrie stresses the importance that death is not scary and its something that can be just as good as living. 

   Similar to Morrie, people in Eddie's life had a very big impact on him however, Eddie never realized until he died. The first person Eddie met in heaven was a man named Joesph that Eddie unknowingly altered his life forever. Is it possible to not realize how much people change our lives? When Eddie was seven years old his baseball got thrown in the street and he ran after it, Joesph was driving down the street and saw Eddie, he slammed on his breaks. Eddie got the ball, ran away and never looked back. However, Joseph suffered from a heart attack due to the stress making his heart pump fast and died. The lesson Joseph wanted to teach Eddie was to see things from two different perspectives and how the same moment can effect people very differently.

   The Second person Eddie met in heaven was his captain from war. The captain comes to Eddie to try to instill in him that life is only the beginning and their is a lot more to be learned.  He explains to Eddie that "heaven is where you get to make sense of your yesterdays." The captain has the same philosophy as Morrie did when trying to explain to his former student that life is only the start and that death is not the end.

    Both Morrie and the first two people Eddie meet in heaven are there to help two people that lost the meaning in life and feel hopeless. Their main goals are to make sure Eddie and the student feel comfortable with death and believe that their is more to be learned. They also wanted them to see how people truly do make an impact on your life and cross your path for a reason, even if you don't realize what that reason is right away.
Tuesdays with Morrie movie Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1N4W7_Qhao