A very well-written book, both in its storyline and its lines of Socratic dialogue between Tempest Moseley and his Angel guardian, Joshua. You see, Tempest is shot by some white police officers in Harlem, around about 2008, and he goes up to be judged at the Pearly Gates. Lo and behold, his life of pilfering money from the charity box to give the money to his friends and family, or stealing an insurance card to help a terribly beaten woman get life-saving medical care are seen as grievous sins by Peter. And it is Peter's judgment that Tempest must go below to the realms of hell.

Tempest is not too happy about that decision and challenges. He challenges it to the point that he is thrown out of the judgment waiting line and sent back to earth with Joshua Angel to be persuaded to accept his fate. If he does not accept his fate, all of heaven and hell will be upended and cease to exist as they have done so for millennia.

And so begins a set of modern-day Socratic dialogues. Instead of walking through Athens, Angel and Tempest sit on park benches, or have coffee at Starbucks, or meet in an apartment and discuss what it is to be poor and black in Harlem. How a low-paying job can pay havoc with trying to get ahead, not just staying ahead of the landlord. How living in fear of others is a day-to-day life experience of black men. How unfair and unjust Tempest's life was, and how he committed his sins for the betterment of others, not just because he had a mean streak or needed to act out his violent rages.

The dialogue is raw, the events are timely, and the questions need some pondering. There is absolute good and evil as presented here, but sin and non-sin are questioned, as are some of the individuals who did truly horrible things and did not wind up in hell. And it begs the question: how does the lack of privilege or access to food or schools create an underclass of human beings who are otherwise shunned? And why is there now an us" and "them" mentality and how can it change? ( )

Tempest Landry is a young man trying to make the best of what life in Harlem has handed him. One day, in a case of mistaken identity, he is shot and killed. When he arrives at the Pearly Gates he is held accountable for his acts, turned away and told he is on his way to Hell. Tempest disagrees with the judgment – he’s not a bad guy. After all didn’t he buy groceries for his aunt when she was ill? Okay, he stole money from the church to do it. And didn’t he stand up in court to help send a man to jail? Okay, the man was innocent but only of that crime. He was a known rapist and murderer and deserved to be jailed. St. Peter cannot be swayed yet Tempest stands his ground and refuses to make his was to Hell. This has never happened before and the precedent could rock the very foundations of Heaven as we know it (if it has foundations to be rocked). Offering St. Peter a compromise Tempest is sent back to his old life (albeit in a different body with a different name) with a guardian angel so that Tempest can come to realize that no error was made in the Heavenly accounting. As the guardian angel attempts to make Tempest see the error of his thinking, Tempest introduces the angel to the grey areas of being a human with free will. Not only that, but Satan is a little miffed that he has lost a soul so he pays a little visit to Harlem as well.

This book was humorous, entertaining and yet thought provoking as well. It raises so many questions about the nature of good and evil, free will, racism and the difference between bending the rules and actual sin. Kudos to Mr. Mosley, as through Tempest, he finds an original and creative solution to a situation that could bring Heaven to its knees.
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Oddly fascinating. Very bad theology, but an interesting premise. Good one played on Bezal Bob. ( )

A fun, quick read! ( )

I just gobbled this up in audiobook form. This book is a tightly woven collection of short stories (not quite a novel, but not really independent stories either). The main plot trope is pretty familiar (person dies, heaven lets them be reincarnated to do something or prove something), and Mosley’s story has a few things in common with the others. One difference, of course, is that he sets the novel in Harlem with a black male protagonist. The angel ("Mr. Angel") who comes along with Tempest is incarnated looking like a black man, but he has no experience of racism (or anything else human for that matter). So there are some great conversations between them that allow Mosley to explain the world as it looks to his protagonist.Most of the tightly connected stories involve arguments between Tempest and Mr. Angel about the nature of sin. There’s also a simple love triangle, and at one point a “man of wealth and taste” (cf. Rolling Stones song) gets involved.On the surface the conversations seem to be about religion, and you’ll probably get more out of the book if you are glancingly familiar with Christian religious tropes such as St Peter, Heaven, Hell, judgement, Lucifer, and so on. (However, for reasons that are unclear to me, although I'm quite sure it's deliberate, Mosley never mentions Jesus.)But I don’t think the book or the conversations are really about religion when you get right down to it. Religion, and the bureaucratic, rule-bound heaven that Mosley makes up, is standing in for the system that glorifies government and corporations at the expense of people, that oppresses poor people and people of color, and that tries to brainwash people into believing that they have to mindlessly follow rules that don’t make sense in the real world. I’m afraid I’m making the book sound really dour and boring. There really are a lot of conversations about ethics and they get a little repetitive toward the end, but the book is playful and moving with lots of really funny moments. The audiobook is produced by Griot Audio, a division of Recorded Books that specializes in books by African-American writers, narrated by African-American performers. This book is really well narrated by Ty Jones. As a white person, I don’t know much about African-American speech patterns, and I don’t get as much out of reading books that rely on those speech patterns as some people might, because I can’t reproduce them accurately in my head. So it helps my appreciation a lot to listen rather than read. ( )