The Heavens

Starred review from November 1, 2018
A young woman's dream life threatens to permanently alter her day-to-day reality.In America in the year 2000, a Green Party president is in office. There is peace in the Middle East. Against the backdrop of this "utopian fervor," 20-something New Yorkers Ben and Kate meet at a party. Ben falls in love with Kate and her eclectic group of friends, who warn Ben that Kate is flighty, impractical, childlike. And, strangest of all, she's plagued by dreams in which she lives as an Elizabethan Englishwoman in the year 1593 and is convinced when she wakes up that she has traveled in time and somehow changed the future. Newman (The Country of Ice Cream Star, 2015, etc.) weaves back and forth between Kate's dreams of the 16th century and the 21st century, in which Kate resurfaces from her dreams to find a different government, different wars, a different society, her family altered--and Ben telling her things have always been the way they are now. As Kate grows more and more confused in her waking life, and as the stakes get higher in her dreams, Ben must decide whether or not he can save the woman he loves--and whether she needs saving. Newman is known for her bold imagination, and this kaleidoscopic novel is no exception. Like an apocalyptically tinged version of The Time Traveler's Wife, Kate and Ben's love story encompasses difficult questions: What is mental illness? Can art, or love, have power? Is humanity doomed? And if it is, then how do we create a life with meaning? And even though the novel's dream-logic structure is challenging, Newman's sentences, like the embroidery Kate practices, pull the story along with their intricate beauty.A complex, unmissable work from a writer who deserves wide acclaim.

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November 1, 2018
Ben meets Kate in August 2000 at a party in the opulent Manhattan apartment of her rich friend, Sabine. He's half Bengali and half Jewish, and she's Hungarian-Turkish-Persian. He learns from the start that she doesn't live entirely in the real world. As their relationship blossoms, she tells him of her dreams in which she time travels to England in 1593, where she is a black woman, Emilia, mistress to a nobleman, and in both personas, she believes she has something important to do to save the world. But Ben can put up with Kate's worlds for only so long, until her mental illness, which isn't easily treatable, becomes apparent, reminding him of his mother, who committed suicide in a psych ward when he was 13. The narrative toggles between the modern and Elizabethan ages, with vivid accounts of the latter including Emilia's growing relationship with Will Shakespeare, and snaps back to Ben's reality on 9/11. In this tender love story, Newman ponders the impact of individual action on the world as she creates alternative universes, realities, even endings. Fiction as provocative as it is ambiguous.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from January 1, 2019

Ben and Kate meet and fall in love at a party in New York City at the turn of the current millennium, in what seems like our world but slightly altered for the better--more affluent, hopeful, and under the leadership of an environmentally friendly female president. Kate, who has dreamed since childhood about being a different person asleep in an alternate reality, begins to awaken in this dreamscape, in which she is a noblewoman in Elizabethan England, friend and then lover of a little-known poet named William Shakespeare. Somehow these dream escapades, fully realized and corporeal, start affecting her daytime existence, and she wakes up every day in a slightly worse iteration of the world, in which her "false" memories of concurrent realities deem her insane. Newman (The Country of Ice Cream Star) neatly manages the uneasy feat of pulling off a historical novel featuring both William Shakespeare and Alexander the Great, foreshadowing the action with philosophical musings on the butterfly effect and the Great Man theory of history. VERDICT A thought-provoking, head-spinning fever dream of a novel; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 9/24/18.]--Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY

Ben and Kate meet and fall in love at a party in New York City at the turn of the current millennium, in what seems like our world but slightly altered for the better--more affluent, hopeful, and under the leadership of an environmentally friendly female president. Kate, who has dreamed since childhood about being a different person asleep in an alternate reality, begins to awaken in this dreamscape, in which she is a noblewoman in Elizabethan England, friend and then lover of a little-known poet named William Shakespeare. Somehow these dream escapades, fully realized and corporeal, start affecting her daytime existence, and she wakes up every day in a slightly worse iteration of the world, in which her "false" memories of concurrent realities deem her insane. Newman (The Country of Ice Cream Star) neatly manages the uneasy feat of pulling off a historical novel featuring both William Shakespeare and Alexander the Great, foreshadowing the action with philosophical musings on the butterfly effect and the Great Man theory of history. VERDICT A thought-provoking, head-spinning fever dream of a novel; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 9/24/18.]--Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY