While the description of the story is more or less accurate (32-year-old woman lives with parents, works at Fast Foto, decides to sell her engagement ring after her fiance calls off the wedding, begins a journey toward a new life), I found it a little facile. It doesn't begin to convey the richness, sweetness and humor of the story, and I wasn't terribly thrilled with that "journey to new romance" closer; that toward which the heroine moves is not new romance, but a new sense of control over her own life -- which might happen to include romance (Shea never spells out the new romance explicitly, but leaves much to the reader's imagination, one of the many things I love about Lite.)
The heroine lives what appears to be a simple life in a quiet town, the daughter of a good-humored but passive father and a fierce martinet of a mother. Told repeatedly by her mother that a) she is nothing special and b) her parents' one expectation of her is that she "be good," she grows up believing fully in her own ordinariness. (Shea illustrates this by never revealing her heroine's name, a provocative device that I particularly like.) She lives this way until the arrival of the man who would be her fiance, a star of the town and parish, recently returned from years of city living and working. During their short but intense courtship and engagement, she begins, tentatively, to realize that she might have something other people find extraordinary after all -- and she does -- and that maybe her mother's stolid, angry style of parenting has done her a great disservice. Thrown back into ordinary life by the breaking of her engagement, she decides to sell her engagement ring through the Pennysaver, setting off a chain of interviews that ultimately set her free, much to her mother's displeasure.
Rereading this review, it still occurs to me that plot explication doesn't really do the novel, the heroine or the author any justice. Some things, like precious stones and beautiful pieces of music, are better experienced than explained. Selling the Lite of Heaven is one of those.
