A promising first novel

In 1920s New Orleans, Raziela Nolan is young, rich, beautiful, and vivacious, as well as independant, educated, and prone to slipping pamphlets on birth control in books at the public library. She is torn between accepting an engagement to her boyfriend Andrew or starting her education to become a doctor, until fate denies her a decision when she slips and hits her head at Andrew's pool and drowns. Thus starts her journey into the afterlife, making friends with others who are as yet unwilling or unable to pass into 'heaven,' in Ronlyn Domingue's The Mercy of Thin Air.

Eighty years later, Amy and Scott buy Andrew's old bookcase (which he had given to the son of Emmaline, his parents' former maid) at an estate sale. Razi's attachment to the bookcase causes her to follow the young married couple; she discovers that Amy is granddaughter to the recently deceased Sunny, who was the younger sister of Twolly, Razi's best friend in life. After her grandmother's death, Amy is distraught with her Grandpa Fin for destroying Sunny's photos and many sentimental belongings, and then who dies before she can forgive him. This act of destruction causes Amy to gather and compile to disc the family's remaining family photos, with the help of Great Aunt Twolly, now in her eighties, but at the expense of her relationship with Scott. As Razi continues to shadow Amy, while reminiscing about her own life, she observes parallels in Amy and Scott's lives to hers and Andrew's.

In some ways, The Mercy of Thin Air resembles Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones. Both are first person narratives of the deceased character, both young women denied a long life, both full of regret for what is lost. The book also serves as a lesson to live life to the fullest, as Nel, one of Razi's friends in the afterlife, states after 'teaching' himself the cello in his spirit form: "that's what I wanted... I did the wrong thing... what I thought I should do, not what I wanted. And I can't take it back," a statement which causes Razi to look back to her own decision regarding her life with Andrew. The two titles also touch on how the living mourn the dead differently, and how some people cope and some cannot. And on how love continues, despite the pain. As Emmaline sagely notes, "that's how you know you love someone with all your heart, when the world get (sic) so cold without them."

May we all learn these lessons ourselves.