On May 1st, 2010, Mark Oppenheimer reviewed “Heaven” in The New York Times:

About a year ago, our neighbor’s beloved mutt, Bruno, went to dog heaven, followed six months later by Bear, the sweet brown Newfoundland down the block. I am not speaking metaphorically but repeating the wisdom of my 3-year-old daughter, who learned her theology from “Dog Heaven,” a picture book by Cynthia Rylant. All dogs get biscuits in Dog Heaven, Rylant writes. Even better, “The dogs in Dog Heaven who had no real homes on Earth are given one in Heaven. . . . And each dog is petted and reminded how good he is, all day long.”

While reading Lisa Miller’s “Heaven,” I realized that Rylant’s is my idea of heaven, too. Miller aims “to write a book that might guide people through the thicket of their own views about heaven by holding up a mirror of other people’s beliefs, both current and past.” And she succeeds, with me anyway.