The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom is a tribute to the author's real life Uncle Edward. "The version represented here," Albom writes, "is only a guess, a wish, in some ways, that my uncle, and others like him - people who felt unimportant here on earth - realize, finally, how much they mattered and how they were loved."

This thin novel is a combination of It's A Wonderful Life meets A Christmas Carol meets Richard Paul Evans meets Nicholas Sparks' eternal-love-between-a-couple meets Albom's didactic lessons from his previous blockbuster about his dying teacher, Tuesdays With Morrie.

The story begins with the main character Eddie's death on his 83rd birthday as he is trying to save a child from a falling amusement park ride. Eddie has spent most of his "unremarkable" life keeping children safe.

Through vignettes, including certain of Eddie's significant birthdays, he meets five people in heaven who have either had a life-altering impact on him or he upon them. Each person brings a lesson to show the relevance of his own "insignificant" life to him, to reveal to him that his life, in fact, was remarkable and a touch-point for other lives.

In effect, writes Albom, each life lived "affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one."

The first person Eddie meets in heaven, for example, is The Blue Man, a once carnival freak whose skin "which seemed to be soaked in blue fluid, folded in small fatty layers around his belt." He is blue because in life he ingested silver nitrate for his nerves in such quantities that it turned his skin permanently blue and, thus, became a sideshow freak.

"I would sit on the stage, half undressed, as people walked past and the barker told them how pathetic I was," he says. "For this, I was able to put a few coins in my pocket. The manager called me the 'best freak' in his stable, and, sad as it sounds, I took pride in that. When you are an outcast, even a tossed stone can be cherished."

Though such thoughts create a nice tale with warm, fuzzy feelings all around, Heaven is laced with scenes of below-the-belt sentimentality, seemingly designed to put a catch in the throat or a pain in the heart and trying too hard to impart its heavy-handed message. Without Albom's name and the enormous success of Tuesdays With Morrie, it wouldn't get the attention it is sure to receive.

Shaking the image of Morrie may be difficult for some, since both books carry the theme of an old man reflecting on life - not that this is likely to prevent Albom's hungry audience from enjoying the novel.

But others seeking lessons about the underdog would do best to stick to the tried and true. For triumph of the human spirit, try Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. And Charles Dickens is no slouch for stories of ghosts and spiritual interventions.

For inspiration, I'll choose these masters over Albom any day.

Justin Matott is the author of "My Garden Visits" and other nonfiction works, as well as many children's books. He lives in Littleton.