A Million Heavens Kindle Edition

Unlike traditional works of fiction this does not fall into chapters but rather in episodes of each character and their intermingling of lives. Brandon tells a story that enlightens with each character's passage of time even the humanizing of a lone wolf enraptured by the music of one of the key players. This is a wonderful "adventure" in the Albuquerque desert although it could be told pretty much anywhere, anywhere the loneliest thoughts and desires have relevance.

I really like the idea of layering the vignettes over and over in an attempt to make the narrative less linear and more "spiral" like. It's worked for others, and it has potential to work for a story like this.But oh man, the stifling lack of nuance ruins almost every laudable quality this book might attain to. The characters are gratingly predictable in their tendencies, and when the author goes for surprise, it feels less like deft literary subterfuge, and more like irritating juvenile sneakiness. That is, it's only a surprise because you wouldn't think a published author would indulge in such hackneyed devices.And though you'd hardly think you could distill the un-enjoyability of this book into a single flaw, there is one possibility: the almost inconceivable abuse of cliché. I won't even try to catalog them all here. But it stretches ones capacity for suspending disbelief to think that this work was actually edited by, like, an *editor.* There are turns of phrase so tired that one struggles to understand how the word processing program on the author's laptop didn't insert some of those green squiggly lines that usually imply, "Are you sure you want to write this, since, you know, it kinda sucks?"I cannot explain how much I love McSweeney's, so I had at least moderate hopes for this. But without indulging an iota of hyperbole, the most generous review I can give of this book is to call it amateurish. You can occasionally glimpse a flicker of talent bouncing off the rough-hewn facets of the largely uninspired story arc, but it utterly escapes me how the folks at McSweeney's thought this was a finished work worth submitting to the public.

Beautifully written and beautifully crafted. Reads like butter.

This book is OK, but it is not my type of story. This is a personal preference, not a criticism. IT is different, and has interesting view of how different people could and can respond to different situations. AND I am sure there a lot of people that would enjoy. Mary

Next Garcia Marquez

The separate story lines,were interesting and conveyed the longing for meaning in an otherwise empty life. I thought the ending didn't quute,tie up the loose ends

I like the writing.I like Brandon's way of putting words together.But I'm confused about intensions. And I find the story too "metaphysical".

First, the physical book is an object of art — southwestern. It is not southern gothic. It might be magical realism - many actions of wolf thoughts, for instance - but the point of the loosely woven random tales eluded me. One paragraph toward the end reveals that the author does have talent. Perhaps he is young …