My favorite two of Marisa de los Santos’s books are her first two, the predecessors to her latest, I’ll Be Your Blue Sky, so I was excited to discover the further adventures of Clare Hobbes, first seen as a plucky waif in de los Santos’s debut, Love Walked In. The commonality with all of this author’s books — and the reason I keep going back to her in times of strife which this presidential administration certainly is — is that she writes most wonderfully and tenderly about love. Love of people, certainly, but also love of things and books and houses and moments. Her books are suffused with it.
Clare Hobbes is three days out from her wedding, and she is having doubts. An old woman called Edith, a stranger to her, sits with her in a garden and gives her advice; a few days later, Clare has ended her engagement, and the old woman has died, leaving Clare a house in her will. As Clare struggles with her feelings about her former fiance and her even former-er boyfriend, Dev, she becomes more and more fascinated with Edith’s life. Together she and Dev try to uncover the secrets Edith has left behind — and that’s all I’m going to say about that, because I understand that some people unfathomably dislike spoilers.
Though perhaps it would chagrin the author’s dazzle to hear me say so, I am never reading her books for the romantic love therein contained. She can be FRANKLY a trifle woo-woo about the holiness of romantic love, and that is true here of both the Clare-and-Dev unit and the Edith-and-Joseph unit, our two main romantic pairings. By contrast, she is wonderful on friendship and familyship. Edith’s chapters, set in the 1950s, explore several important relationships in Edith’s life, each drawn with most particular care and gentleness, such that it is impossible not to love Edith and root for her and George and John. For Clare, I’d have liked to see more of her with her family, and more work going into those scenes when they did happen.
Her chemistry with Dev was good, though again, more for the friendship than the romance. De los Santos gives them a comfortable, jokey banter such that their very occasional slips into negative emotions with each other are satisfyingly painful. I’d have liked a bit more of that maybe! It was hard for Clare to feel like a full character when a lot of her feelings throughout the book stay at the surface level.
Which leads to my major gripe with the book: I didn’t feel that Clare’s fiance Zach was a successful character. A thing I’ve loved in Marisa de los Santos’s past books has been the relationships that aren’t quite right, where the parties want different things or maybe they want the same thing or maybe they want different things some times and same things other times but still it just won’t do. Her first book, Love Walked In, is immensely good at depicting a relationship that won’t work, and for me, the unworkable relationship in I’ll Be Your Blue Sky doesn’t achieve that same success. In part because I didn’t feel I knew Adult Clare, and in part because Zach wasn’t fully developed either, I couldn’t see why Clare had ever been with him. It’s a really important element of the story (and it ties in with Edith, as well!) that just didn’t land for me.
That said, Marisa de los Santos is the Bard of Loving Small Things in my own personal canon of writers, and I’ll Be Your Blue Sky at times makes you feel that love as keenly as you’ve ever felt it in real life. So. There’s that.
Note: I received a copy of I’ll Be Your Blue Sky from the publisher for review consideration. Because I asked for it. Because I really like Marisa de los Santos and I hope you will too. Start with Love Walked In.