Heaven

Heaven is the first book of the Casteel Family sequence by V. C. Andrews, published in 1985. It is written from inside the experience of a child rather than observing the family from outside.

Heaven Leigh Casteel lives with her brothers and her stepmother in a mountain community where her family sits at the bottom, and the novel establishes her position in terms of what she is denied: clothes, cleanliness and a father who will not mistreat her. Against that she holds on to pride and ambition, and to the plan that she and her brother Tom share, which is to leave and prove that the children are decent and capable.

The stepmother's departure removes the only buffer in the household, and Heaven's father then arranges something that endangers the children directly, which is the event the rest of the novel turns on. The book opens a series that follows the family across several volumes, and the material is domestic rather than supernatural. Her father's scheme is aimed at the children themselves rather than at his wife's departure, and the horror in the book stays domestic: it comes from adults who are supposed to be looking after them.