Love Walked In/Belong to Me

Marisa De Los Santos has achieved something that has become so rare that it makes one want to shout from the roof top—“Hey, I’ve found it! Look!” De los Santos has successfully navigated the murky waters of the pejoratively named “chick lit” genre. In her first novel Love Walked In, de los Santos creates characters so warm and real that is nothing short of a refreshing delight to meet them again in her powerful sequel Belong to Me.

LOVE WALKED IN

My life – my real life – started when a man walked into it, a handsome stranger in a perfectly cut suit and, yes, I know how that sounds. Or I know how it might sound, to the kind of person I used to be, one who spent her days skirting around the edges of adulthood, commitment, responsibility, accomplishment – whatever word you use to describe diving into the deepest part of being human. Take your pick; they’re all woefully inadequate, but they’re also all we have. –Love Walked In, page 287.

Cornelia and Clare are the lovable and surprisingly—even tenderly—real pair at the center of Love Walked In. Cornelia is a modern woman who is successfully filtered through the lens of reality and, thankfully, is nothing like the Sex and the City image that movies and television lead viewers to believe are everyday people. Cornelia is a college educated woman who took a detour after one semester of graduate school. When the reader meets Cornelia, she is contentedly managing a coffee shop in Philadelphia. She is not stuck so much as waiting until she finds a career path she loves. She is navigating the city and enjoying life—and classic movies—when Martin Grace enters her life. He is a dreamishly handsome, successful businessman who, of course, takes and instant liking to Cornelia. He is, in appearances, everything that she would have if she could design her ideal man—right down to the striking resemblance to Cary Grant. However, Martin and Cornelia don’t quite click that way that Cary Grant always seems to in the movies. When his daughter Clare enters the scene everything changes drastically, leading to a love story (or two) of a whole other kind. 11-year-old Clare is going through a life crisis that people beyond her years are beyond the means to cope with. She enters Cornelia’s life and takes her by storm. The relationship is not always easy but is quite real. In the process of trying to help Clare, Cornelia finds some of the pieces—and people—missing from her life.

Love Walked In is not revolutionary. The book brings little actual substance to the table—other than—quite often—beautiful prose and real characters. For years the book has sat on my shelf, I did not rave about it—though I loved it. In fact I rarely ever mentioned it except when someone asked for a light reading recommendation. There are some poignant lines and phrase throughout the book that I have added to my list of quotes, but it wasn’t until I finished de los Santos’ second novel that I found the revolutionary qualities of the central characters.

BELONG TO ME

It seemed impossible that you could stand in a kitchen making hot chocolate and grilled-cheese sandwiches with your best friend dying in the next room, the voices of her children tangled up with the voices of your own, that you could butter bread and watch, through the window, the trees relinquishing their leaves and hear the silvery tumble of water into a kettle, and be suddenly aware that what resided at the heart of every shape and sound was peace. A rightness hovering above all that was wrong, shimmering, like heat rising from a street in summer.

--Belong To Me, page 85

Belong to Me is novel of an entirely different sort. While Love Walked In has elements of real life among the two central love stories, Belong to Me is, in many ways, entirely about real life and the unexpected, unwanted obstacles that fall into our lives.

Cornelia has now been transplanted from the urban life, to the suburbs. Far from the picturesque, Rockwellian life she had imagined, Cornelia is faced with navigating through the social circles strictly controlled by Piper—who, of course, takes an instant disliking to Cornelia. However, Piper is not all that she seems. Piper is dealing with a dying best friend and a swiftly imploding marriage. The reader will soon realize that Piper needs a friend just as much as Cornelia does. Then there is Dev the precociously intellectual 13-year-old boy who is trying to navigate the waters of a sudden, and unexplained, cross-country move. Though the Hitchcock-style twist can be spotted from miles away, so gifted was the story and the prose that I was all but screaming, simultaneously, “No, No, No” and “Yes, Yes, Yes” as I began to see the plot twisting.

Belong to Me was a rare novel in a genre filled to brim with clichés. Further to the beautiful prose, when I finished the book, I simply stopped. The book made me think--about nothing and everything all in the same moment. Marisa de los Santos has achieved with this novel that moves the reader to tears, laughter, and thought in equal measure.