Across the Soul's Boundary — Kathy Alba

How would you react if, before your twelfth birthday, two angels yanked you to a place outside the universe and asked if you would help them with a cosmic testing to determine if everyone alive (and the universe itself) was worthy to continue existing? They explain how they'll be watching your growth over the years, focusing in particular on four major life decisions -- which they call "lifekeys" -- to see if you can figure out the meaning and purpose of life and so to qualify as the person heroic enough to help them. Would you be willing to try -- even to fail? Would you risk everything to discover the deepest essences of life? A pretty tall order for a kid? Follow the boy, then the man, David Metternich, as he struggles from his roots on a thoroughbred race horse ranch in California to the mysterious, glittering eastern Boundary of the universe where all meaning seems to begin and to end. What is the Boundary -- something physical? spiritual? universal? personal? good? evil? knowable at all? The supernatural beings imply that the lifekeys are somehow buried there, but David has no idea how to look for them or even what they are.

With his non-stop humor along with a dazzling and larger-than-life personal style, even a certain quietly majestic humanity, David confronts his four major life's choices with intensity and sincerity of heart but with the confusion and uncertainty we all feel in the presence of life's most profound ambiguities, its complex joys, and bottomless sorrows. Always pushed by an awful awareness that the fate of the universe is somehow tangled with his choices, still he is never sure if he's decided correctly, purely. Will he discover our purpose, the reasons for our being alive? Come along on David's journey to discover the deepest meaning as well.

The seven volume epic, starting with David's life adventure, stretches across three generations in dealing with the universal challenge, presents an eye-witness account of the birth of a new universe and its own crucial trial, and ends with outright apocalypse and the end of time. Be there!

Actually, the series is adult fiction, not science fiction or fantasy, about the meaning of life in all its struggles and joys and profound crossroads -- the real purpose for which we've been given life at all. The only reason it involves huge distances of universal space is that the scope is cosmic in confronting the major issues of being alive -- relating human people to the whole sweep of the creation. Heaven and hell are actual places in the series, so the span needed to be large enough to hold and probe them. The epic is intended to make you think in life-changing ways -- but also to laugh and cry.