Mourning Heaven by Amy Lane

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” – Lao Tzu

Mourning Heaven is a story of bigotry in a small California town, where three boys will come of age but only two will survive the burning animosity aimed at them for their sins. It is a story that personifies the best and worst parts of the human condition, a story in which there are those who would eulogize self-righteousness. It’s a story that illuminates the sort of dogma that stirs hatred, flaunts the acrimony and sanctimony of those who believe themselves to be the good and the just, but who so conveniently forget the best parts of their faith, the parts that, if they were to abide, would expose their hypocrisy. The story is a prologue of grief but becomes an epilogue of belief born in the promise that love holds the ultimate authority over all things.

Mourning Heaven is the story of Bodi Kovacs, Michael Hickman and his cousin Peter Armbruster, three young men who are irrevocably bonded by love, guilt, anger, and the crushing grief of losing someone long before he was ever stolen by death.

It is the story of a boy who was idolized and beloved, a boy so full of spirit and courage and conviction that Peter believed he could never approach the bar of perfection Michael had set so high, when, in truth, Peter did the most important thing far better than Michael ever did—Peter loved Bodi with a passion so strong that when Bodi fell to pieces, felt shattered beyond all hope of salvation, it was Peter who was there to put Bodi together again and show him that loving and living sometimes means embracing the power of truth and thriving on the freedom that comes from relinquishing your heart to the one who will reassemble its remains into something new.

There is a Michael Hickman shaped hole in this book—a void that is the haunting likeness of a man whose burden of guilt and shame nearly crushed the two people who’d loved him most in the world, but who now must reconcile their loss and anger and betrayal with grief and forgiveness and a future that will mean something more because it’s built on the remains of a past that has shaped, for better and worse, who Peter and Bodi have become.

There are some books that you know are going to be emotionally eloquent before you ever read the first sentence. Amy Lane’s Mourning Heaven is one of those books. It is a story that is articulate in a way only the best dramatic stories can be, tugging at the heart while also burrowing into the conscience, and giving the reader the ammunition to soldier through it because s/he knows that the long-suffering souls of its characters will be redeemed in the end by the strength and healing that can only be found in the kind of love that is patient and kind and dares to hope and persevere.

Buy Mourning Heaven HERE.