I believe in angels. Not haloed, harp-playing, white-robe-wearing angels, and I don’t have a specific job description in mind for them. Spirits who protect us when we need protecting? Yup. Deliver messages we need to receive? Definitely. Help us experience the connection between the physical and the celestial just so we know it exists? Absolutely.

There’s a movie called City of Angels starring Nicolas Cage, Meg Ryan, and Dennis Franz from the late ’90s. Ryan plays a doctor, Franz is her patient, and Cage is the angel who falls in love with her. Central to the movie is the idea that angels have always been angels. They’re not people who have died and become angels. They’ve never experienced life on Earth, but they surround us as we humans go about our everyday lives. Not gonna lie, I kinda love that idea.

But what of the humans who die and, theoretically at least, go to Heaven? Are they living out eternity just doing all their favorite things? Do they have jobs to do? I don’t think they’re just flying around watching our every move (she writes as she puts that third cookie back in the package…kidding, it might have been the fourth…kidding again, I’m not even eating anything right now). Maybe they’re making plans for our futures…to guide us in the right direction.

I don’t know the answer to any of those questions, obviously. I don’t think anyone does. But I do believe they’re with us.

Example…after my husband Dennis passed in 2020, his brother, his mother, and I went to make the arrangements for his cremation. Corinne was home by herself, lying in bed on her side, with her back to her bedroom door. She felt a flick on her arm. You know what I mean. You form a circle with your thumb and index or middle finger, and you flick someone in the arm. That’s what she felt, and she said it really hurt. My first response was that it was her father, letting her know that she wasn’t alone. Her response was, “well, he didn’t have to hurt me.”

Another example…in our living room, we have an entertainment center with a shelf where we keep the mantle clock that holds Dennis’s ashes. Next to that entertainment center is an end table with a lamp. The matching lamp is across the room next to where Corinne sits on the couch. Today, both lamps are connected to smart plugs, so we turn them off using Alexa. In March of 2021, we weren’t quite so lazy. I would turn off the one by the entertainment center when I went to bed, and Corinne always turned off the one next to her.

While she was on spring break, Corinne tended to stay up later than I did. One night I went to bed, turned off my light, and she turned off the other when she went to her bedroom. At about 2:30 that morning, she sat up in bed and noticed light coming from under her door. Now, she would have noticed it before then. She hadn’t been to sleep. She had just gone to her room. But she got up and turned off the light next to the entertainment center and went back to bed, thinking it was weird but not really thinking anything else. I didn’t know this at 8:30 in the morning when I got the call from my dad that my mom had collapsed at home. When Corinne told me about it, the only explanation I thought of (and still wholeheartedly believe) was that Dennis had come to guide my mom’s way.

Last example…a few months ago, I awoke to the most horrendous, staticky sound in my bedroom. At first, I thought it was the subwoofer for the sound bar connected to the television. Corinne had turned off my ceiling fan using the wall switch the evening before, and I thought maybe it had messed with the smart plugs. But even that didn’t make sense because nothing was making noise in my bedroom when I went to sleep. This had woken me out of a sound sleep.

I sat up and determined that the noise was coming from the drawer in the night stand. When I opened the drawer, I discovered the Amope Pedi electronic foot file that Dennis had always used on his dry heels. Of course I had kept it. I have dry heels too! But it was on…fully on. There was nothing on top of it. It was in the exact position it had been in when I closed the drawer the night before. But it was on. And this isn’t a device with an on/off switch that you flip up and down. It has a gray dial in the middle that you turn one direction to go on and the opposite direction to go off. No way this thing is turning on by itself! And yet it was.

As it turned out, I needed to throw the file away. The batteries had leaked inside. Could a leaky battery make a device turn on? I don’t see how. The dial was in the on position. But could a leaky battery start a fire and maybe…just maybe… “someone” was making sure I threw it away? I’m open to that possibility.

I believe in angels. 👼 How about you?

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Book Review

⭐⭐
2 Stars for What Jonah Knew by Barbara Graham

400 pages
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
Publication Date: July 5, 2022
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Harper Paperbacks in exchange for an honest review.

Publisher’s Description

Helen Bird will stop at nothing to find Henry, her musician son who has mysteriously disappeared in upstate New York. Though the cops believe Henry’s absence is voluntary, Helen knows better.

While she searches for him—joined finally by police—Jonah is born to Lucie and Matt Pressman of Manhattan. Lucie does all she can to be the kind of loving, attentive mother she never had, but can’t stop Jonah’s night terrors or his obsession with the imaginary “other mom and dog” he insists are real.

Whether Jonah’s anxiety is caused by nature or nurture—or something else entirely—is the propulsive mystery at the heart of the novel.

All hell breaks loose when the Pressmans rent a summer cottage in Aurora Falls, where Helen lives. How does Jonah, at seven, know so much about Henry, Helen’s still-missing son? Is it just a bizarre coincidence? An expression of Jung’s collective unconscious? Or could Jonah be the reincarnation of Henry?

Faced with more questions than answers, Helen and Lucie set out to make sense of the insensible, a heart-stopping quest that forces them to redefine not just what it is to be a mother or a human being, but the very nature of life—and death—because of what Jonah knows.

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Main Characters:

• Helen Bird (Alice) – owner of a bakery in Aurora Falls, NY, escaped Oregon and her abusive husband 17(?) years prior and changed her identity from Alice to Helen
• Henry Bird (Danny) – Helen’s 22(?)-year-old son, musician, manager of a bluegrass band who goes missing after a performance Labor Day weekend
• Mira – Henry’s girlfriend, eight months pregnant with their first child
• Lucie Pressman – magazine editor, lives in Manhattan with her husband Matt, but loves the town of Aurora Falls as a vacation spot and would be interested in living there to escape the city
• Matt Pressman – ophthalmologist in Manhattan, likes to vacation in Aurora Falls but doesn’t like the idea of living there full-time
• Lola – Henry and Mira’s daughter
• Jonah – Matt and Lucie’s son

     

What Jonah Knew sounded like an interesting read—part thriller, part mystery, part spiritual, part what do we really know about the human psyche. This last part is what I feel takes the book in too many directions. It’s not a thriller at all, in my opinion. In fact, it felt super slow to me. And before I got even halfway into the book, I knew who did it and why. I just didn’t know how.

The Prologue begins with Henry walking back to his hotel after a bad set with his band. We know this is when Henry disappears. We assume that he dies at some point since we are meant to believe that Jonah could be the reincarnation of Henry.

From here, the book is divided into five parts: 2002-2003, 2007-2008, Spring 2010, Summer 2010, and Summer 2010 (not sure why there are two parts in the same timeframe). I really dislike when books that come into “present day” take place years ago. The only reason I can see for this one to begin in 2002 is Lucie trying to convince Matt that they should buy a home in Aurora Falls, NY, in case there’s another terrorist attack after 9/11. There could be so many other reasons—she’s tired of Manhattan, her mother becomes ill and she wants to be closer, she wants to have a baby but doesn’t want to raise it in the city. Setting the book so far in the past just for the reason to move feels inauthentic.

Parts 1-3 are taken up with Helen trying to find clues to Henry’s disappearance, Mira eventually getting married, Matt and Lucie having Jonah, and Jonah beginning to show signs of knowing things from an alternate past. There seem to be a number of elements thrown in to try to lead the reader astray with what happened to Henry—a note found that he started to write to his father, one of his band mates being involved with drugs. None of these elements were convincing to me.

At one point Helen goes back to Oregon to see her former mother-in-law in case Henry has been in touch. If Henry knew why they left Oregon to begin with, though, I’m not sure why we are expected to think he would go looking for his father…except to make his father a potential suspect. Additionally, and I’m really hoping this is fixed in editing, the beginning of the book mentions that Henry is 22 and that Helen escaped Oregon when he was five. When she goes to see her former mother-in-law in Part 3, which is 2007-2008, Henry should be about 27, but she mentions that she left Oregon 27 years ago.)

For Jonah’s storyline, he begins talking about his first/real mother and his dog. He was born with a red birthmark, which I noted must relate somehow to Henry. He begins having night terrors that Lucie is convinced relate to inherited family trauma. And because of a PTSD-like response in Manhattan on his seventh birthday, they decide to take Jonah away for the summer, and of course they go to Aurora Falls, which is how we see the characters start to put the pieces together.

I won’t give away anymore of the storyline. As a story alone, I probably would have rated it higher, but there are a number of things that made me rate this only two stars. First and foremost, this book reads like a looooong magazine feature about mysticism and world religions, with some anecdotes thrown in.

There are two characters embracing two different factions of Buddhism. Someone was raised Presbyterian, someone Lutheran, Lucie and Matt are Jewish. I know there are lots of religions in this world, but I have never seen so many of them referenced in one novel. Buddhist teachings are referenced a lot because of the reincarnation idea, and Lucie is obsessed with the idea of inherited family trauma.

What I didn’t know when I started the book, but I looked up about halfway through, is that this is the author’s first novel. Her previous work revolves around magazine articles, a memoir, and a number of non-fiction pieces. Magazine writing and creative writing are very different, and this feels too much like magazine writing for me. I was not looking for a dissertation on the teachings of Buddha and the human psyche.

There are a number of descriptions and plot elements that seem thrown in to make it feel more novel-ish, to make the characters three-dimensional, but they don’t work for me.

• When Matt and Lucie visit Aurora Falls, they always go to Helen’s bakery even though they avoid carb loading at home “…especially Matt, who, because of his family history, was fanatical about his LDL/HDL ratio….” We never meet Matt’s family, so this isn’t really even relevant. It could easily be because he’s a doctor and worries about cholesterol.
• Helen vows not to cut her hair until Henry returns home. When Helen gives up on finding Henry and cuts her hair, Lola thinks Henry is back, and Jonah is confused because he knew his “first mother” had long white hair. So the first element leads to the other two, but there’s no indication of why Helen would be superstitious about cutting her hair in the first place.
• When Lucie is pregnant with Jonah, Matt dubs her belly the Matterhorn. Over a handful of pages, the story refers to the Matterhorn four times, including saying “Lucie cupped the Matterhorn from below,” and then it’s never mentioned again. Not once, even in passing. I thought it sounded cute the first time, but then the way it was used after that, with no references later on, sounded odd. Just say “her belly.”
• Helen hires two private detectives, and the second one’s name is Richard Tracy. He literally says, “…just call me Dick.” 🙄
• Lucie’s boss has a personality trait of dropping vowels when she sends emails and text messages. “Grt! B sr to include yr story, will b mr intrstng 2 rdrs…XOD.” This only appears in the book three times, but it was ridiculously annoying, distracting, and unbelievable. No one writes like this, and I can’t imagine any senior magazine editor who would use this style on a regular basis.

Another thing I found confusing is the number of people who use different names. Helen changed her and Henry’s names because they ran away, but she just swapped their first and middle names and changed their last name. Alice Helen became Helen Alice, and Daniel Henry became Henry Daniel. But in private, Helen says that she still called Henry by Danny. So throughout the book, she is alternately referring to him as Henry and Danny. I’m assuming it’s a plot element to convince us that Jonah knows something because he says, “Why do you keep saying Henry? You always called me Danny.” But it was really just confusing.

We also find out that Lucie’s mother, who Lucie has always had a bit of a tense relationship with, has a given name of Phyllis, changed it to Phoebe, and then changed it again to Sonam Dawa, a refuge name given to her by a Buddhist lama. But we never know before this point that her given name was Phyllis. We only find out because Lucie asks “It wasn’t enough to change your name from Phyllis to Phoebe?”

I worked altogether too hard to finish this book for it to be enjoyable. It’s a miss and a pass for me.

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