Then Came Heaven
I’ve been on a LaVyrle Spencer reading kick recently. I was in the mood for something quiet, emotional and deeply immersive, and Spencer’s books nearly always deliver in that regard. Her last published novel, Then Came Heaven, was an interesting read in many ways, but didn’t have the romantic depth of her previous work.
In the small town of Browerville, Minnesota, everyone knows Eddie and Krystyna Olczak. He’s the janitor and handyman at the local Catholic church, and she’s a devoted wife and mother as well as being a mainstay of the community. But when Krystyna is killed in an accident, Eddie struggles to hold it together for the sake of their two little girls. He has a large family doing their best to help, but sometimes that’s just not enough.
The girls’ teacher, Sister Regina, is just as shocked when she hears about the accident, and she even wonders why God would take a woman like Krystyna away from her children. But Sister Regina knows it’s a sin to ask such a question. It’s also a sin to offer comfort by way of a touch or an embrace. The youngest nun in the convent, Sister Regina sometimes chafes silently against some of the restrictions placed on her by her order, and on top of that she finds herself feeling more for Eddie than she should. Meanwhile, Eddie is grateful to her for her support as his daughters’ teacher, a kind and steady constant in their upended lives, but he soon has to remind himself that she’s a nun, and therefore he should be keeping his distance as much as possible.
My favorite part of this story, bar none, is Sister Regina’s daily life as a nun, her gradual disillusionment, and her journey towards a life outside the convent; Spencer describes Catholic ceremonies so vividly that I could smell the incense. I also like the balanced approach here. Even as Sister Regina notices those practices of the Benedictine Order which need change, she acknowledges that the Order has a great deal to offer people for whom that life is the right one. The religious characters in this book feel like real people, not plaster saints or evil sinners.
It’s also sad but believable that Regina’s grandmother convinced her to become a nun – when Regina was just eleven. Before she could even attend high school, let alone go on a date, she was expected to give up any chance of a husband and children of her own. I could have read an entire book about Regina discovering what she needs, as opposed to what her family expects from her.
The other thing I enjoyed was the richly depicted background of Browerville, which has all the ups and downs of small-town life. And Krystyna’s daughters are realistic children who ask questions like, “Do nuns have to brush their teeth?”, not plot moppets who fixate on Regina as their new mother.
So what doesn’t work? Mostly, the romance. Regina is so restricted that she can’t even have an open conversation with Eddie until she gets dispensation from the Pope to renounce her vows. At one point, he says that he always feels better after talking to her, but she’s not allowed to do more than nod, listen and make replies that don’t reveal anything too personal.
On top of that, Regina doesn’t leave the Order until late into the book, so the romance feels rushed. Within a few months of his wife’s death, Eddie is moving on, and since the only conflict between him and Regina is her being a nun, once that’s out of the way, it’s smooth sailing. Also, when Regina leaves the Order, she doesn’t want to depend on her parents for the rest of her life, so she looks into going to university to study child psychology. But after Eddie meets her again, all she thinks about are marriage and babies. I’m fine with a woman wanting to be a wife and a mother, but I’m not sure why a plan to get an education is mentioned if that plan is immediately forgotten when a man shows up.
Finally, there’s one scene which potential readers might want to know about in advance. When Eddie finds out Regina is planning to leave the Order, he takes her to a private room to ask how long the process will last. Barred from disclosing this, she tries to leave. So he physically blocks her, then grabs her arms. She says he’s not supposed to touch her, says he’s hurting her, struggles against him, and prays aloud. Finally she breaks down and answers him, at which point she’s allowed to leave, wiping away tears. The book is set in 1950 and was published in 1997, but still, the scene made me very uncomfortable, especially since I wasn’t caught up in the romance to begin with. Eddie apologizes later, but it’s easy to say sorry once you’ve got what you want. So I wasn’t feeling the meaningfulness of the apology either.
Despite that, there’s a lot to enjoy in Then Came Heaven. LaVyrle Spencer’s love for her hometown of Browerville shines through, and the people of that town are completely authentic. Plus, Regina’s step-by-step transition into a secular life is something you don’t read every day; just the special dispensation from Rome makes it clear this isn’t a story where the Mother Superior will cheer Regina on while singing “Climb Every Mountain”. This book may not be Morning Glory, but it gets a qualified recommendation for readers who have loved Spencer’s other novels, and want to see some of her talent in her final story.
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I'm Marian, originally from Sri Lanka but grew up in the United Arab Emirates, studied in Georgia and Texas, ended up in Toronto. When I'm not at my job as a medical laboratory technologist, I read, write, do calligraphy, and grow vegetables in the back yard.
Book Details
Reviewer: | Marian Perera |
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Review Date: | January 2, 2023 |
Publication Date: | 07/2005 |
Grade: | B- |
Sensuality | Warm |
Book Type: | Historical Romance |
Review Tags: | 1950s | clergy | grief | Minnesota | Modern Historical | realistic parenting | Widower |
I adore the setting of this book – both the town and the church life. It’s so authentic. However, I agree with every comment you’ve made about the romance, especially how rushed it feels. Regina and Eddie almost have to start falling for each other before his wife is cold for the whole process to be crammed into one year.
I also think the author didn’t quite succeed at convincing me that Regina’s leaving the convent wasn’t about a man. I think it would have helped for some of Regina’s scenes of discontent with her life to have happened before Krystyna’s death. Then we could have seen something that looked more like “I’m not sure this life is right for me… and now that I am paying more attention to the outside world, I think that’s the right one” instead of everything happening at once.
Spencer has a complicated history for me; as we saw earlier in the week her work’s very much a product of the ’90s, and she was also one of my first favorite contemporary authors. I remember liking this one when I was younger and now I wonder if it’d hold up.
In a time when billionaire heroes ruled the romance world, Spencer and Morsi were two of the only people writing about the middle class. I think that was part of her appeal back in the day, but since contemporary romance now has a more diverse population with a lot of strong writers, I don’t think her stories would fair well in the current market.
Yep, even Spencer’s historicals were about working class people, from what I can remember.
Spencer used to be one of my favorite authors and an auto-buy for me. She almost always has something in her books that’s triggering, but for the most part, she uses it to good effect to show the humanity and fallibility of her characters. Not saying that makes what happened right, just that she is often able to help the reader move beyond that moment and see it as part of the character’s journey. That said, there are times when it is just plain inexcusable. I can remember giving a couple of her books an F because I simply couldn’t move beyond what happened.
I haven’t read this one, but it sounds intriguing. I will have to add it to my huge TBR.
You make an interesting point about authors who include such elements in their books. Are those authors good enough, or is the story good enough, to compensate for a plot point or a character’s behavior or a scene that’s cringeworthy or unpleasant to a triggering level? The answer probably varies per reader, and if a reader feels that this aspect of the book is so problematic that it’s inexcusable, that’s just as valid a reaction. Though I’d be interested to hear which of Spencer’s books you’ve given a F to!
I gave an F to Bitter Sweet, which I genuinely hated. The “hero” left his small town in Wisconsin and married a successful and talented career woman, and both agreed they didn’t want kids and were all about their jobs. When there is a big change to his family (IIRC his dad died), he decides he hates big city life and heads home to his small town, more or less just telling the wife that’s what’s gonna happen. She goes along, even though it is a great inconvenience to her and forces her to travel a lot for her job. And then he decides he does want a family and is furious she doesn’t want to drop everything to accommodate him. He has an affair with his high school sweetheart, who, of course, does get pregnant just like he wants. The author tries to add a paragraph towards the end that makes how he treats the wife okay (suddenly, she’s been having affairs their whole marriage), but it was too little, too late, and too unbelievable for me. I hated the self-righteous heroine, who feels she is superior to the rest of the world for her homey skills (sews, cooks, bakes) and love of small-town life, and the completely selfish and self-absorbed hero and despised how the story depicted big-city, career-minded women as unworthy of love.
Bygones was another F. A couple gets divorced because the wife goes back to school to get a degree and, during that period, doesn’t have time to make home-cooked meals (apparently, she resorts to casseroles, which anyone who has ever made one knows take plenty of work unless it’s of the green bean Cambell’s variety), WEARS JEANS around the house rather than dressing up for her husband (the horror!) and doesn’t hang out with him. He winds up having an affair with a woman who lives in heels, makeup, and skirts like a proper lady. They divorce, but the marriage from the affair doesn’t work out (not sure why but she probably got sick and didn’t wear makeup that day), the wife finishes her degree and starts dressing up, having been made to feel bad for not doing so, and the two reunite. I wanted her to put him in a wood chipper and marry a lumberjack who scorned women who wore heels and dresses. Typically I would hate that kind of male lead, but the story needed some kind of extreme to counterbalance a guy who believed women should dress up for their man while doing housework in the 1990s. I lived in the city in MN where this book takes place. MOST of us wore jeans on the regular because it FREAKING SNOWS a lot there. The temperature is in the 40s by late October. I lived in a high-end suburb, and people would have been scandalized by a woman who dressed up to do housework. The fashion code tended to be sweaters and jeans/slacks. I was one of the few who wore dresses/suits to work, and that was because I had previously worked at a bank, where they were required. It took me a while to spring for a business casual wardrobe.
Oh God—BITTERSWEET! I think that was the book that made me realize that LaVyrle and I were on different paths. I hated the way Spencer demonized the wife in that one. Marriages fall apart all the time, and Spencer could have taken a nuanced approach to the breakup, but she painted the wife as completely awful (including, iirc, pretending to be pregnant at one point). I enjoyed a number of Spencer’s books back in the day, but the Madonna-Whore dichotomy was strong even in her best books. I don’t think I could read her work today.
I read the excerpts of both these books. BYGONES begins with the estranged couple’s daughter inviting them both to her place for dinner without telling either of them that the other person will be there, and family members who conspire to push people together will never be enjoyable to read for me.
BITTERSWEET seems more interesting because at the start, the heroine is grieving the death of her husband and trying to find ways to cope. But as a woman who likes city life and being child-free, it’s probably not for me either (and I’m not keen on the dichotomy where you can either pursue a career in the big city, which is bad, or be a small-town woman who bakes and embroiders, which is good).
Oh God, yeah, these are not likely to age well for me at all.
Heh, I saw your comment after I made mine, Maggie and yep, that’s how I used to feel about most of her work. I’m very curious as to how I’d rank her stuff now.
I liked that Spencer’s books often tackled difficult love stories with flawed characters. You got the sense from her stories that most of us could hobble our way to a HEA despite our pasts. I, too, wonder if I would still see it that way. Out of the 24 books she wrote, I thoroughly enjoyed the following:
Separate Beds (I liked this in spite of an extremely strong, to the point of the obnoxious, pro-life theme.)
The Endearment
Sweet Memories
The Gamble (the hero is more than a little bit of a jerk, but it worked okay)
I ADORE Morning Glory and would still list it as one of my favorite romances of all time.
Years, Vows, and Forgiving all had some dark themes but were good reads in spite of that. The rest were mostly Cs except the two Fs.
MORNING GLORY was my favorite Spencer too. And I also loved THE FULFILLMENT (a historical romance about a woman who gives birth to her brother-in-law’s child—with her husband’s knowledge and, I hesitate to use this word but, permission), which is full of details about farm life in the late-19th century. I still vividly remember the scene where the whole family has to work together to kill potato bugs.
Morning Glory is my favorite, although I’ve only read three by Spencer. The other two were The Endearment and The Fulfillment, and both were good. I think I’ll stop there. :-)
The Fulfillment became a made-for-tv movie that absolutely infuriated me because the ending was changed and there was no HEA. I think I read that Spencer was also upset by the change, which, afaik, was dictated by the weird morality policing that tv indulged in (and may still, for all I know).
I tried to read SMALL TOWN GIRL, but although I appreciate that the heroine wasn’t giving up the prestigious, big-city career she loved for the hero, it just didn’t hold my attention. Maybe because I’m just not into country music, or musicians per se.
YEARS was another lovely read. I wouldn’t mind trying HOME SONG too, because at least the “other woman” doesn’t seem to be demonized in the excerpt. And FORGIVING has, as you said, some dark themes, but I’d like to read it again, because I first picked it up a long time ago and I want to see how the “a man wants to marry a prostitute he’s fallen for” subplot is handled (better than in MORNING GLORY, I hope!).
Morning Glory and Years are also my favorite Spencer books.
The book Till the Stars Fall by Kathleen Gilles Seidel is about a couple who broke up young and then come together later in life. The hero is a former musician. The novel is set in Minnesota. I liked it much better than Small Town Girl, but then, I am a huge fan of KGS. I wish she was still writing, but it looks like her website has not been updated for years.
For readers who find the religious aspect of interest in Then Came Heaven, try Body and Soul, by Anne McAllister. That is, if you can find it. I really enjoyed reading and rereading it, but it is out of print: https://www.annemcallister.com/books/quicksilver-series/body-and-soul/
Interesting list, Maggie. I acquired copies of Family Blessings, Twice Loved, and Morning Glory. I remember liking Seperate Beds (must have read as library book) and the rest I’ve either never read or were not memorable. I have no notes in my reading journal documenting that I read Then Came Heaven but the plot description is vaguely familiar.
I struggled with Twice Loved as a romance, but it is an interesting book. My heart just ached for the third person in the love triangle, same with Vows. I don’t tend to be a big fan of love triangles in general, though, so that may just be a me thing.
I avoid love triangles for that reason. Either the third person is roast evil with ugly sauce on the side (and I end up wondering why the hero/heroine hasn’t realized this yet) or the third person is kind and generous and doesn’t deserve to be rejected.
Exactly. It either makes a fool of the h/h, or it is heartbreaking. I also tend to feel if you can’t decide between two people, you probably don’t really like either of them and should find someone else entirely.
Thanks for the heads up!! It’s important to share possible triggers for ppl.
Thanks! That wasn’t the sort of scene which would have bothered me when I first started reading romance, but unfortunately it hasn’t aged well.
Same!!