If I haven’t recently recommended Marisa de los Santos’s Love Walked In and Belong to Me, let me take the opportunity to do so now. She’s a writer along the lines of Jojo Moyes or Rainbow Rowell, where the books feel light-hearted even when sad things occur, and where the author seems to be the direct puppeteer of your heart strings (in a good way! not in a manipulative way!).
Falling Together, de los Santos’s third book, was kind of a disappointment. I had my doubts about her fourth one, The Precious One. But I am glad to report that Marisa de los Santos is right back on form. She’s a lovely and lucid writer, and her particular strength as a writer — which she has in common with Rowell and Moyes, and which makes me cherish them so much — is her generosity to her characters.
Taisy Cleary’s father cut ties with her and her mother and brother when Taisy was eighteen, and she has hardly spoken to him since. Now Wilson has contacted her and asked her to come visit in [location], where he lives with his glass-blowing wife and his new daughter, the eponymous “precious one,” sixteen-year-old Willow.
It’s such a dear of a book. As Mumsy pointed out to me, and Jill mentioned as well in her review, Marisa de los Santos writes better women than men: Either the male characters are too impossibly wicked or they’re too saintly good. So there’s an extent to which you may need to suspend your disbelief about some of what happens in this book. But it’s still lovely. If you like Jojo Moyes, hit up The Precious One. And then read Love Walked In and Belong to Me, cause those books are the books I read when I start to feel forlorn.