With romance novels becoming a dime a dozen as they fracture off into multiple fantasy-filled categories, it is refreshing to occasionally find one that dares to go a bit deeper into complex issues while also remaining in the realm of the all too real. Jennifer Weiner makes this bold move with “Then Came You,” a flawed but still notable story of love and romance for the modern world.
The brave new age of altered family constructs is at the center of Weiner’s approach, with a particular focus on the issue of surrogacy. In chapters alternately presented by each participant in a surrogacy effort, the pieces of her puzzle neatly snap together. There is Jules, the predictably beautiful blond Princeton scholarship student whose challenged upbringing leads her to sell her eggs to pay for her father’s rehab.
Then we meet Annie, another struggling young woman seeking to help her growing family pay bills accumulating because of her husband’s low-paying job. It is this desire for cash as well as a need to find a sense of purpose for her life that lead her to volunteer to be a surrogate, offering her body to bear another woman’s child.
Both women openly participate in surrogacy for the money, but they do so with an altruistic intent and a laudable dedication to family, a refrain that runs through this tale and often lends an overly sweet note to the story.
Filling out this tripartite mothering plan is India, the one paying the bills and seeking a child of her own. Her hard-luck childhood rivals Jules’ tragic story, but her path out was not through brains and book smarts but through beauty and street smarts. A full makeover of body and identity has landed her the grand prize — marriage to an incredibly wealthy older man who dotes on her every need. India, though, feels a hole and seeks a baby to complete her picture-perfect family vision and also, like the other women, looks to this child as a way to make amends for her problematic past.
While her husband is fully supportive of this plan, his grown daughter, Bettina, is completely opposed. Still bitter over her own mother’s abandonment, she sees India as the wicked stepmother and, upon hiring a detective agency, receives a full dossier on India’s misguided and unlawful past. She adds the final piece to this jigsaw of women seeking to modify the past through the formation, or in the case of Bettina, destruction of a new family unit centered around a jointly conceived baby.
And so sets the tone of this it-takes-a-village-to-make-a-child story as we are led through backgrounds, conception, pregnancy and the tormented but still blessed day and its aftermath. This book flutters through the women’s relationships with each other and with their largely acquiescent partners, one of whom is notably a woman and another a black man, offering a marginal nod to evidence of other modern relationship pairings, seemingly each placed there more for good measure than for any plot reason.
The plot twists are largely expected until we land at an ending wrapped in a sparkly bow. This revelation of ending might be a spoiler were the book not so predictable in its adherence to its genre defined mold.
Conformity to genre aside, Weiner deserves to be commended for stepping out into a contentious topic zone and perhaps her choice to place it safely within this paradigm allows her to open up a dialogue in an unthreatening way, encouraging thoughtful consideration of this topic that is taboo in some circles. While much of her book is written with too rosy a glow, she allows harsh realities to occasionally seep through, particularly when it comes to the vagaries of custody and prenatal laws, issues rarely approached in novels of this type.
Ultimately, this book does not offer great insight, but it does provide a thought-provoking approach to a well-written bit of entertainment. Some may find in this book a medium for a launch into further investigation of the topic of surrogacy. But likely most will simply find in it a quick, too-sweet read in a story of love persevering even amidst the most unconventional families.
Adera Causey is curator of education at the Hunter Museum of American Art.