When I started reading this book, my first thought was that the premise was an interesting one, but one that could very easily go wrong if not properly tackled and well written. Mitch Albom’s “The First Phone Call from Heaven” is an attempt to explore faith, hope, loss, and what motivates people to believe.
The plot takes place in the small, peaceful town of Coldwater, Michigan, where one Friday, residents started receiving phone calls from their lost loved ones claiming to be calling from heaven. Katherine Yellin, a real estate agent who has been receiving calls from her lost sister, was the first to reveal that truth to the people of the town, becoming the focal point of the media’s attention and the spark that started a country-wide craze with the events in Coldwater. Many people believed it’s a miracle while others were skeptical and thought it was just a well executed hoax. One skeptical person in particular, Sullivan Harding (Sully), sets out to uncover the truth about the phone calls.
I really enjoyed the parts narrated from Sully’s point of view. Maybe it’s because of how much I admired him not taking people’s account of events at face value. How he went to extremes to find and reveal the truth and followed his intuition against popular belief when he felt that something was off. Or because of his resilience and how he took the blows of being publicly disgraced and sentenced to prison, losing his career and his wife for an accident that wasn’t his fault and still managing to keep going. Sully’s story, to me, was the most interesting part of the book. That was a character whose mystery I really wanted to unravel. I also loved the parts about Alexander Graham Bell’s history and how well integrated they were in the overall plot.
I found the amount of shifts in characters’ point of views to be a bit overwhelming though. Yes, the nature of the novel necessitated the existence of more than a single angle from which the plot is viewed, but I may’ve liked it better if the shift was less frequent or limited to three characters that represent the whole spectrum of opinions while revealing and developing the remaining set of characters through those three. The three being the reverend, Sully, and Katherine Maybe.
In my opinion, ‘The First Phone Call from Heaven’ didn’t really live up to its potential. It didn’t really raise any new questions in my mind or tackle the concept of belief from a particularly unique angle. It didn’t inspire me in any way. I wouldn’t really call it a mystery novel either. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy exploring the characters though. I enjoyed pondering why, faced with the same set of evidence, some people chose to believe one thing while others chose not to. I liked how in the end, Albom left it up to the reader to decide. And I liked how light and properly paced the story was.
“No soul remembered is ever really gone.”
― Mitch Albom, The First Phone Call from Heaven
A Bookworm's Ramblings 