Review – Belong to Me

Belong to Me  by Marisa de los Santos

From the book jacket -

In Belong to Me, we meet charming, insightful Cornelia Brown as she struggles to forge friendships with the women in her new town and discovers that even the most joyful marriage can encounter unexpected, and sometimes frightening, hurdles.  Across the street lives Piper Truitt, a blond, imperious queen bee whose complex inner self breaks to the surface of her picture-perfect life as she cares for her best friend, recently diagnosed with cancer.  And then there is Lake, the feisty mother of sensitive, whip-smart Dev, who has moved to Cornelia’s town so her son can attend a school for gifted students, but who actually harbors a deeper motive.  As their stories unfold, these characters become entangled in a web of trust, betrayal, love, and loss that challenges them in ways they never imagined and that ultimately teaches them what it means for one human being to belong to another.  With wit and charm, de los Santos explores the accidents both big and small that magically converge to make up a life, delivering to us a wonderfully luminous and enchanting story.

My thoughts -

As many of you know, I recently read de los Santos’ first novel, Love Walked In, and fell completely in love with it.  Well this novel was no different in my reaction, I LOVED it.  I loved how my favorite characters from the first novel starred in this one too, and I loved how de los Santos incorporated new characters so seamlessly it felt like they truly belonged from page one.  The woman has a way of writing about people’s lives that is so incredibly spot-on, she writes thoughts exactly the way people think them, and she writes interactions between characters exactly they way they would happen in real life.  Not only that, but her characters are so darn REAL.  Definitely with flaws, but nothing so crazy out of the ordinary that it doesn’t really occur in real life.  I don’t know really what else to say, except to say read these books.  Like I said before, they are not the most literary or elegant books ever, but they are touching, sweet stories, told from very realistic characters’ points of view.  Highly recommended.

10 stars.

Read 3M’s review here.

Review – Love Walked In

Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos

From the book jacket -

When Martin Grace enters the hip Philadelphia coffee shop Cornelia Brown manages, her life changes forever.  Charming and debonair, the spitting image of Cary Grant, Martin sweeps Cornelia off her feet, but, as it turns out, Martin Grace is more the harbinger of change than the change itself…

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, eleven year old Clare Hobbes must learn to fend for herself after her increasingly unstable mother has a breakdown and disappears.  Taking inspiration from famous orphans (Anne Shirley, Sara Crewe, Mary Lennox, and even Harry Potter), Clare musters the courage to seek out her estranged father.  When the two of them show up at Cornelia’s cafe, Cornelia and Clare form a bond as unlikely as it is deep.  Together, they face difficult choices and discover that knowing what you love and why is as real as life gets.

My thoughts -

I absolutely loved this book.  The first chapter reads like chick lit, which made me very wary of what was to come, but once Clare came into the picture, everything started to make sense and the book had a life of its own.  The story really got to me, I mean I sobbed during several of the scenes.  And I just loved how de los Santos drew the story out slowly, making you fall in love with the characters before you really understood anything about their lives, so that when important things happened, you cared so much about what would happen to the characters involved.  I also liked how it ended (obviously, I won’t give it away) – not exactly what you hope for, but if it was somebody’s actual life, it couldn’t have ended in a better way.  Even though this may not be the best written or most literary book out there, it has plenty of value and is an incredibly touching story that will stay with you for awhile (I finished it last week, and am still thinking about it).

9.5 stars