A StonewallBarbara Gittings Literature Award Honor Title Eric Schlich's Eli Harpo's Adventure to the Afterlife isan accessible and big-hearted novel that explores belief and forgiveness as a boy grapples with his faith and sexuality on a rollicking family road trip to Bible World. When Eli Harpo was four, he underwent emergency open-heart surgery, flatlined on the operating table, and for a brief time, went to heaven and met Jesus. Or at least that's what his father, a loving but devout Baptist minister, has raised him to believe. Nine years later, Eli isn't so sure. His rounds with his father to evangelize at hospices and sell his father's self-published book, Heaven or Bust!, feel inauthentic and strange, especially now that he's started having sex dreams about Jesus. Between that and his mother's terminal breast cancer diagnosis, Eli feels further from heaven than ever.