I found Parting Secrets by Becky Melby and Cathy Wienke to be a surprise. I picked up the book as a freebie on Amazon yesterday. The title is from Heartsong Presents, an imprint that used to belong to Barbour Publishing. The imprint was purchased by Harlequin in 2012. Unfortunately, Heartsong Presents has since ceased being a published line, but many of its books are now appearing in e-book form as Truly Yours Digital Editions.
Parting Secrets has some interesting, uncomfortable, and complicated plot developments for a short Christian novel. For starters, the two protagonists, Jeanie Cholewinski and Steven Vandenburg, have a past, which resulted with Jeanie getting pregnant out of wedlock. That was challenging in itself, but the uncomfortable complication was that at the time, Jeanie was a seventeen year old high school student, and Steven was a 22 year old student teacher. When Jeanie realized that she was pregnant, she ran away to keep the pregnancy a secret from her family, and to protect Steven from being charged with statutory rape. She also left without telling Steven about the baby, and they do not see each other for almost thirty years.
Through what Jeanie and her mother would call "Godcidences," coincidences orchestrated by the Lord, Jeanie and Steven have been reunited at the wedding of their daughter. It is here where Steven finds out that Angel is his daughter and it's a bit much for Steven to take in. He struggles with the anger that he feels over Jeanie's abandonment and neglect in not telling him that he had a daughter. However, he still carries a torch in his heart for Jeanie after all these years, and now as a widower, he is free to finally pursue a much longed for relationship with her.
Jeanie, a baker, has had a hard life as a single mother. Her dream of becoming a teacher may be finally within her grasp when she enters a baking/pastry competition where the grand prize includes a nine month apprenticeship in France with a renown pastry chef. Now that her secret about Angel is finally out, she is ready to pursue this dream. She isn't ready to drop this in order to have Steven in her life. In addition, a dangerous man from her past is trying to pull her back into a dark lifestyle, one in which she had been trapped in for three years after she had left Steven. She cannot bear the thought of the exposure of this secret life being made known to her friends and family, especially to Angel and Steven.
Will Steven be able to convince Jeanie to give them a second chance? If Jeanie does choose Steven over the French apprenticeship, will Steven still want her after finding out what she did to survive in those mysterious three years? Will she also be able to protect Angel from the threats that the dangerous man is making?
SPOILER ALERT
At 176 pages, the authors have packed a lot into the plot with such limited room. There is plenty of foreshadowing about Jeanie's secret past, and although it wasn't exactly what I thought that it was going to be, her entrapment into and involvement in sexual exploitation added to the list of heavy topics that were touched on in this novel. Much of the emotional angst was centred on the fear that Steven would reject Jeanie once he finds out what she did during those three years. There was also Steven's turmoil over Jeanie's removal of his freedom to choose whether to go to jail for having sex with an under-aged female (and being reunited after his incarceration), or to have a life without Jeanie and Angel, a life that he always felt was second best.
If the novel were longer, I think that the story could have delved more into the guilt that our protagonists may have felt over their respective choices and actions. With a longer novel, I think that the issue of forgiveness could have also been developed further; Steven's anger over Jeanie's disappearance and withholding of Angel's existence seemed to be minimalized. Any anger or bitterness that the girls who were hurt by Jeanie during those dark three years seemed to be easily glossed over with the explanation that they knew and understood why she did what she did. Maybe, truly, people can be that gracious and forgiving, but it would interesting to think about what might have been if things were not that neat and tidy in the execution of this plot.
SPOILER ALERT OVER
As I mentioned before, Parting Secrets tackled quite a few taboo topics, making it a meatier novel than what I anticipated from such a short novel. The novel wasn't terribly heavy, but it had more substance in it than what I would have expected. I also found it intriguing that the protagonists were an older couple, rather the young'uns that appear in the majority of romances that are out in the market today.
