Buried secrets churn beneath the placid surface of a small town in this tragicomic debut novel...rendered in pitch-perfect dialogue by sharply drawn characters whose folksiness still encompasses layers of complication and conflict. A bit like a darker-tinged version of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon narrative, Maher's fictive universe unfolds with richly humorous details and expansive meaning. A funny, poignant tale of an imperfect paradise. - Kirkus Reviews
Magical realism comes to the heartland...A rich amalgam of a novel, Heaven, Indiana is out of this world and so much of it. - Michael Martone
A story of crossed paths, of roads not taken, a leaving and a homecoming. This little bit of Heaven leaves us wanting more. - Wendy Fawthrop, Seattle Union Record
A lush, multilayered portrait of the cycle of life, the interconnectedness of human experience, and the sometimes painful but always necessary struggle of each individual to search for a sacred niche that can legitimately be called "home." This is a remarkable piece of writing. - Arthur C. Jones
The book reads like the town's best gossip bending your ear, with all the juicy details and half-truths that make gossip so compelling...Remarkably, Maher is able to maintain a convincing consistency of character through decades of life changes, both subtle and dramatic. This book is over much too quickly. - VIviann Kuehl, The Midwest Book Review
There is something about the loneliness and self-sufficiency of the characters, something about their secrets and their passions, their loyalties and the fact that they remain mysteries to each other, that keeps me attached to this book in a way I can only assert, but not explain. - Susan Koppelman
It has been a long, long time since I have read a novel that left me feeling so filled and yet so emptied at the end. Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe comes the closest. In Heaven, Indiana, Jan Maher describes life in a small, perhaps failing Midwestern town that in a sense, sits on the edge of eternity. In a place where everyone knows everyone else's business, secrets flourish and permeate the fabric of the town's life. Ms. Maher tells her story not only with economy but with such extraordinary clarity, sensitivity and understanding of, and compassion for, human nature, it took my breath away. Heaven, Indiana is heaven. - Laura Palkovic
I love this book--the control of tone, the ingenity of plot, the delicious prose! As an English prof I'm a persnikety reader, so you can imagine, when I say that it's on my short list of books to cherish, how many it beat out. Can't wait to get my hands on the sequel and see these people again. The startling end of this novel promises developments beyond our conceiving, though not beyond Maher's. Not much is beyond hers. She's a great pleasure and a happy discovery. - Ann B. Tracy
★ 2018-03-02
Buried secrets churn beneath the placid surface of a small town in this tragicomic debut novel.Once a station on the Underground Railroad and later a Ku Klux Klan stronghold in the 1920s, the village of Heaven, Indiana, has a tangled history of grace and sin. Maher begins its beguiling saga in 1954, when Madame Gajikanes, a Romani fortuneteller passing through with a traveling carnival (her decidedly non-Romani real name is Nancy White), finds a newborn infant left in a basket at her tent. She duly raises the baby girl, named Nadja, to be a carnie performer who specializes in telling fortunes from dirty dinner dishes ("It's like tea-leaf reading. I read from the pattern left on your plate after you've eaten"). Nadja's wanderings intersect with the lives of Ellie Denson, a waitress at Clara's Kitchen who wishes she too had the gumption to get out of Heaven, and Sue Ellen Sue Tipton, whose House of Beauty becomes the clearinghouse for artful gossip thanks to her phenomenal head for town lore. Also threading through the tale are aging farm couple Helen and Lester Breck. When Helen decides that Lester is not really Lester but a farmhand who looks just like him, the long-suffering husband takes his wife's delusions in stride while covertly seeking consolation with other women. There's more than enough death and derangement in Maher's yarn for a prairie gothic potboiler, but she defuses the melodrama in a well-observed comedy of rural manners that breaks down larger villainies into smaller misdemeanors, tinging all of it with a wisp of magical realism. (Fortunetelling, it turns out, is 99 percent reconnaissance and 1 percent something else.) The author's prose manages evocative flights—"Elephants paced restlessly, their immense feet beating slow syncopations"—but it dwells mainly in small-town naturalism rendered in pitch-perfect dialogue by sharply drawn characters whose folksiness still encompasses layers of complication and conflict. A bit like a darker-tinged version of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon narrative, Maher's fictive universe unfolds with richly humorous details and expansive meaning.A funny, poignant tale of an imperfect paradise.
