Book Review: Where Heaven Meets Cheyenne

Reviewed by Nikolas Mavreas

A moving novel about illness, faith, and good spirit

Charles MacDuff Westerman’s debut Where Heaven Meets Cheyenne explores illness, faith, perseverance, and humor in the face of suffering. In alternating chapters jumping decades, it relays the stories of three connected individuals faced with their own weakness and mortality, as well as the effect this has on the people around them.

Chuck Westerman is a brainy young pastor living in Cheyenne, Wyoming with his bright wife Diana and their three young boys (Jeremy as in Jeremiah, Mick as in Jagger, and little Charles). Despite their education’s potential for lucrative jobs (Chuck has a degree in law from a high profile university), they opted for a modest life of doing good for the poor in their community in Chicago before settling in Cheyenne. When Chuck is hit with the symptoms of brain cancer, he is faced not only with his mortality and the grief of his family, but with the loss of personal identity as well.

Aaron Hamilton is Diana’s younger brother. A witty, promising, and all around impressive teenager, he is befriended by new schoolmate Tye after his and Diana’s family moves to a new Wisconsin town. Aaron becomes enamored with Tye’s popular older sister Alicia, who likes him too. However, his life takes an unforeseen turn after a bad fall at the nearby lake.

Paige Bainbridge lives with her husband Luke, a rancher, and their daughters in Chugwater, Wyoming. Their initial high-school romance was interrupted when the religious Paige realized it would not work out due to Luke not being a Christian, which he mends by trying to become one. Twenty years later, Paige, too, has cancer and is doing everything in her powers to fight it.

Westerman, the author, narrates in the third person, but he never feels too far away from his subjects. His prose is engagingly conversational, and the dialogue is realistic. The style often reaches the lyrical, particularly in the beautiful descriptions of environment (that of Wyoming and the Rocky Mountains) as well as in the inspiring ruminations about faith and doubt.

“Stiff, monotonous winter winds blowing snow from the west into stubborn drifts—their forms conceived in December and still clinging crustily to the ground in February, daring the sun to warm enough to melt them. And above all, the splendor of the Wyoming night sky. So studded with stars you thought Heaven was on the brink of breaking through to dwell on Earth…”

Where Heaven Meets Cheyenne pursues with conviction themes of acceptance without surrender, the reconciliation of belief with harsh reality, and the pursuit of dignity in undignified circumstances. Endearingly, all the main characters are intellectual, even bookish. A character offers a comment about a Flannery O’Connor story that applies to Where Heaven Meets Cheyenne itself: “It makes me think about things worth thinking about, and that makes it worth-while.”

This novel evokes the feelings and experiences of living with and around cancer and disability, as well as their reconciliation or not with faith. A meaningful book.

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