The girl who saw Heaven A fateful tornado and a journey of faith

A spiritual memoir about a near-death experience that offered a young girl a glimpse of the afterlife. Ari Hallmark was 6 years old when a tornado lifted the house where she and her family were sheltering and sent it spinning through the air. Ari survived, but her other family members did not. Ari emerged from this terrible ordeal with an incredible story, narrated by Reburn and Tresniowski. Ari remembers being ripped from her father's arms and spun up by the tornado; then, she says, "I got to walk with my whole family up to Heaven." Much of the imagery she describes sounds like a child's vision of heaven, but the text struggles to communicate the ineffable--e.g., how angels fly, colors that don't exist on Earth, a peaceful sense of perfect rightness. Ari believes that she was returned to this world to deliver a message: "You are going to see your loved ones again. Your time on earth with them is not your last time with them." Ari's first-person account of her experience takes up 13 pages. This is one of the only times we hear her voice, as most of the tale is related by Reburn, a retired educator who became close to Ari in the days after the storm. Much of what the authors write about seems superfluous. There's backstory filled with details that clutter the narrative rather than illuminate it, and there is far too much repetition--including a chapter in which Ari describes her time in heaven once again. There is no doubt that some readers will be so inspired by Ari's story that they will read the book in one sitting. Other readers will find that this could have been a long-form article rather than a 300-page book. A balm for Christians but unlikely to move or inspire nonbelievers. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Sixteen Days Out SIXTEEN DAYS OUT April 11, 2011 Vestavia Hills, Alabama It began, simply enough, as air. Air caught between the higher atmospheric pressure near the earth's surface and the lower pressure in the surrounding atmosphere, a tension of warring meteorological forces that spun the air into wind. Winds that grew stronger over the tropical waters of the Gulf of Mexico and began whirling in a counterclockwise circle, propelling themselves out of the Gulf and toward the US coast, where electrical energy and booming shock waves transformed them into thunderstorms. A long, sturdy, rolling line of thunderstorms, weak as they swept over Mississippi, but intensifying as they crossed the border into central Alabama late in the afternoon of April 11. Thunderstorms that rumbled fourteen miles northeast into Vestavia Hills, a quiet Birmingham suburb, where, at 7:29 p.m. (central time), their peak winds were measured at 100 mph--powerful enough to earn them a new meteorological designation. The storms were now a tornado. A tornado that touched down somewhere behind the Vestavia Hills Police Department building on Montgomery Highway, and from there ripped through the playground and picnic table area in nearby Byrd Park, snapping or uprooting thirty towering pine trees, knocking over numerous large hardwoods on the grounds of the Vestavia Country Club, and dislodging drywall fasteners on a home next to the club, one of several houses damaged by the winds or falling trees. And then--the tornado was over. It lasted one minute. It had a small impact area--one hundred yards wide by a half mile long. Its 100 mph winds made it an EF1 tornado, the second-least-dangerous type on the EF Scale, which rates tornadoes from zero to five based on wind strength and damage. The EF1 on April 11 did not, luckily, kill a single soul, and it was seen, for the most part, as a relatively minor weather event. Only later would meteorologists look back on the tornado and see it as something else altogether--a harbinger of what was yet to come. Excerpted from The Girl Who Saw Heaven: A Fateful Tornado and a Journey of Faith by Lisa Reburn All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.