Alive with warmth, wit, and faith, Ellis’s charming debut covers centuries and generations in this sphere and beyond, as a pair of souls errantly released from Heaven seek each other across lifetimes in ours as the angel-in-training responsible for the errors strives, with the help of his family and the archangels themselves, to put things right. The stakes are high but Ellis’s approach is cozily engaging, concerned with the everyday travails of humans and the souls and angels in Heaven. Ellis structures the tale in three novella-length sections, the first opening with the ascent to Heaven of a 9th century monk. He’s eventually promoted from imbuing microbiota with souls to working on humans, which is where the trouble begins, as young Janie, in our era, is born with talents beyond the prodigious—she’s connected to something beyond us, brilliant at languages, music, art, and more.

Janie is lonely, though, and after her somewhat distracted parents get her a fancy teddy bear rather than a pet, Janie does something miraculous: she reaches through a “soul portal” and imbues T-Bear with a stray soul. That’s not Janie’s only miracle, and as she develops a reputation as a healer she snags one more soul, too, to inhabit a doll, Suzie, as a companion for T-Bear. That sets Heaven scrambling, and the second two novellas follow the fallout, as the souls of Suzie and T-Bear come to Earth for fresh go-arounds, this time as humans. In playful, polished prose, Ellis writes lives of great promise and all-too-human hardships—her souls witness illness and loneliness, the everyday lot of humans.

Despite the book’s hefty length, Ellis keeps this all light and lively, even passages about cancer or tragic deaths, and she sketches out the history of each soul’s Earth family with brisk, engaging authority. Readers shouldn’t expect romantic longing or battles with demons from this uplifting story of lost souls, Earthly ambitions, and divine bureaucracy, but they will find buoyant good humor, touching miracles, and bursts of wisdom.

Takeaway:Warm, witty novel of a heavenly error and lost souls on Earth.

Comparable Titles: Graham Downs’s Memoirs of a Guardian Angel, Joan Fennell Carringer.

Production grades
Cover: B+
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A-
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A-