Heaven Eyes
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| Author | david almond |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Young adult novel |
| Publisher | Hodder Children's Books |
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Publication date
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2000 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| ISBN | |
Heaven Eyes is a young adult novel by award-winning author David Almond. It was published in Great Britain by Hodder Children's Books in 2000 and by Delacorte Press in the United States in 2001. A paperback version was released in 2002 by Dell Laurel Leaf.
Heaven's Eyes was adapted as a stage production, which premiered in Edinburgh in 2005.
The story focuses on three children who run away from their orphanage and are rescued by Heaven Eyes, a strange, innocent child with webbed hands and feet. Heaven Eyes should have drowned at sea, but was rescued from the mud, and only Grampa knows the secret to her history. He isn't telling. They find themselves investigating the mysteries surrounding the old printing press and storage building where Heaven Eyes lives. During the time they spend with Heaven Eyes and Grampa, they begin to see the outside world as a land of "ghosts". The children have to choose to stay in that eccentric, mysterious and possibly sinister world or to flee back to safety in the mundane world and perhaps lose the hopes of spiritual healing they discovered in Heaven Eye's world.
Like most of Almond's other young adult books, Heaven Eyes focuses on the balance between fantasy and reality, all within a quaint and eccentric but mysterious and somewhat unsettling world. Other major themes include spiritual healing and family (particularly mothers, as many of the main characters long for a mother they have never known or have known but tragically lost).
When Almond began writing the novel, he felt that Erin should be the main character because she was the strongest and because he wanted to write from the point of view of a girl this time. Almond referred to the novel's opening line, "My name is Erin Law", as a "bit of an homage" to the opening line of Moby Dick, "Call me Ishmael." The abandoned building in the novel was inspired by a real building located on a "sludgy river gully" near the Tyne, which has been turned into Seven Stories, an attraction that promotes literature.
The novel is told from the first person, the first sentence being, "My name is Erin Law." The author then introduces the other characters, and indeed, tells the entire story, through her. Erin lives at Whitegates, a home for "damaged children". Erin's father was a foreign sailor who left her mother after a brief affair. Years later, Erin was grief-stricken when her mother died.
Whitegates is run by a well-meaning but flawed woman named Maureen. Erin and January Carr and some other children frequently reject her superficial, half-hearted attempts at therapy.
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