The Heavens
Written by Sandra Newman
Narrated by Cassandra Campbell
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
From their first meeting, Ben knows Kate is unworldly and fanciful, so at first he isn't that concerned when she tells him about the recurring dream she's had since childhood. In the dream, she's transported to the past, where she lives a second life as Emilia, the mistress of a nobleman in Elizabethan England.
But for Kate, the dream becomes increasingly real and compelling. And soon she's waking from it to find the world changed-pictures on her wall she doesn't recognize, new buildings in the neighborhood that have sprung up overnight. As she tries to make sense of what's happening, Ben worries the woman he's fallen in love with is losing her grip on reality. Transporting the listener between a richly detailed past and a frighteningly possible future, The Heavens is a powerful reminder of the consequences of our actions, a poignant testament to how the people we love are destined to change, and a masterful exploration of the power of dreams.
Sandra Newman
Sandra Newman is the author of the novels The Men, The Heavens (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), and The Country of Ice Cream Star, longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post and NPR, as well as several other works of fiction and nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s and Granta, among other publications. She lives in New York City.
More audiobooks from Sandra Newman
Julia: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Men Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
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Reviews for The Heavens
71 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Interesting premise that turned into a meandering series of disjointed pages from random graphic novels. Don’t look for a shred of coherence even if the time travel trope is a genre you previously found interesting. Worst was trying to anticipate how the writer would tie anything together and encounter frustration where the dystopian was reckless literary malaise.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Warped Time or Warped Mind?
In Sandra Newman’s inventive but sometimes erratic The Heavens, we readers are left to decide for ourselves whether Kate is a time traveler or a loon. For in this take on time travel and history and dystopia and mental illness and, for good measure, Thomas Carlyle’s Great Man Theory (generic man, of course), Kate begins in one version of Earth, circa 2000, a pretty good one, it seems, does stuff with folks like Will Shakespeare, and ends up in another, the proverbial handbag of dystopian alternative history; in other words, our world in tatters.
In 2000, at a party, Kate and Ben meet. They begin a relationship and eventually fall in love. Even though Kate seems the desultory type who sleeps a lot, he loves her. However, things begin falling apart when Kate begins to forget things, or remember events at odds with the reality Ben knows. Not just Ben, but all their friends notice Kate’s eccentric behavior, including her parents, who tell Ben she’s always been that way, making her own reality.
When Kate explains it to Ben, it sounds even crazier. When Kate sleeps, she awakens in 1593 England as a consort to a rich man. She speaks Italian, in addition to Elizabethan English. She meets a writer hanging on the coattails of a lord, who turns out to be Will Shakespeare. Then Kate begins to believe in her dreams, which might be more than dreams, she’s doing things that change the future, her real world of 2000. Whenever she returns, things are different, different buildings, wars, presidents, and the like. Will reinforces her belief that she, one person, is changing the course of history, because he reveals that he, too, shares the apocalyptic vision she has, namely the smoking shell of a city.
The first half of the novel relates mostly her dream life, and Newman nicely captures the times, down to the smells and diction. The second half deals with Kate in real time after much has changed and she has been diagnosed as mentally ill. In this reality, she’s pregnant. And she has learned or is convinced she is a time traveler, one in a succession of individuals who create a chain that preserve each other and affect the timeline. In her reality, the final reality, the world is crappy place along the lines of most dystopian denouements.
While the book is thoughtful and not nearly as confusing given the changing perspectives, it does tend to be dark and sometimes sluggish. So, readers who either dislike, or like, this novel might want to give Elan Mastal’s All Our Wrong Todays a look. It’s a humorous romp through time, wherein the character starts out in a near perfect world, messes it up (that is, turns it into our world), and then is left to put things right.
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- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In the year 2000 Ben meets Kate at a party at Sabine’s apartment in New York. Kate is ‘different’ warns Sabine, a rich girl intertwined with left-wing politics, but Ben pays no attention. Ben and Kate fall in love and very soon move in together. But Ben’s year 2000 isn’t the same as ours ...And after all, it was the year 2000 — Chen’s year, the first year with no war at all, when you opened up the newspapers like opening a gift; a year of mass protests at which the same violin-playing blind girl would always appear and play the same Irish air; the year Les Girafes occupied the embassy of Germany and flew the anarchist flag and the Jolly Roger from its broken windows; that best ever year when Ben was first in love.Meanwhile Kate dreams. Kate has always dreamed, and in her dreams she is another woman dreaming in a different time and place. But in her dreams she is always asleep, never awake. But one day she does wake in her dream and she isn’t Kate any more but Emilia, living in London in 1593, pregnant with a child that is not her husband’s. And Emilia has visions of ‘a jagged city of fire and cinders, a writhing apparition of a dead world’. And Kate (or Emilia) knows that she has to do something to prevent that world coming to pass, but each time Kate wakes, the world is just a little bit worse.This didn’t quite live up to its initial promise for me, but a good read nonetheless.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a complex book, and I think it's going to take me a few weeks to really digest it now that I've finished it.It starts off as a fairly simple love story between Ben and Kate in New York City. Kate has an eccentric group of friends, and Ben is delighted and fascinated by her social circle and her family. The reader gets little hints that this world is very different from ours - the president is a woman, no one has a cell phone. Kate is a fascinating character: she is quirky and naive, and her art shows the sweet inner workings of her mind. Kate has vivid dreams in which she is Shakespeare's lover. These dreams turn the novel into a time travel / historical fiction story.-- From here on, the review doesn't exactly contain spoilers, but might be more than you want to know if you haven't read it --Then the world where Ben and Kate are in love starts to unravel. Ben is certain that Kate has a mental illness. Kate is an interesting mix of active and passive: on the one hand, her dreams and her actions in her dreams shape reality, but on the other hand, she feels like a passive observer as this happens around her. She does not believe she has a mental illness, but she is so unmoored by how the world changes when she wakes that she doesn't protest when Ben tells her she has a mental illness and needs treatment.The book explores mental illness from both Ben's and Kate's point of view: Kate feels like her world is falling apart around her and doesn't have the energy to fight when she's told she has a mental illness. Ben struggles with how to love someone who is so broken, but finds himself unable to keep her out of his life.Meanwhile, the world continues to get weirder and more apocalyptic. It's hard not to read this as an allegory for the current state of the world, as we watch authoritarianism and white supremacy make unexpected and rapid comebacks.This is a complex and compelling book. I listened to the audiobook, and I think I probably missed some nuances of Newman's writing. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it thoroughly.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a strange, difficult, beautiful, and thoughtful book. It raises many questions, few of which it answers. It is the sort of story of our time that makes one wish for a different time - and it's about that, as well.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Even Sandra Newman freely admits that her novel, The Heavens, is almost impossible to describe. It is part historical fiction, part time traveling fantasy, part political allegory and part social realism. It deals with the effect serious mental illness has not only on patients, but on those who love them. The novel is so complex, and yet only 257 pages, that I read it twice in a row to try to keep track of the time travel changes each time Kate, the protagonist, wakes from her dream of Elizabethean England. I won't get into details about the plot for fear of spoilers but will say that it is the type of story that sticks in your mind weeks after reading. And it helps if the reader is open to time traveling story lines. Highly recommended.