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.

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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.

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(Stop me if you’ve heard this one.) I was a little disappointed.

Let me back up. The protagonist of Falling Together is Pen, a single mother of a five-year-old daughter, Augusta. Pen is still grieving the two-years-past death of her father, and she lives with her brother since the collapse of her relationship with Augusta’s father. She has never stopped missing her college friends Will and Cat; their unbreakable friendship trio broke up for unspecified reasons, and she hasn’t seen them since. When she receives an email from Cat asking her to come to their college reunion, she leaps at the opportunity. Off somewhere else in the country (I forget where), Will does likewise.

The source of my disappointment was not that the writing was worse than in previous books, because it wasn’t. Marisa de los Santos is a lovely writer. She doesn’t overwrite, it’s not showy, but she writes in such a way that I am conscious, while reading, that I am enjoying her writing style. She has, also, a gift for capturing the magic in everyday moments without lapsing into the realm of the saccharine. These are all reasons that I would not necessarily have minded the paper-thin plot, which felt more like an excuse to put all her characters in the same room for extended periods of time, than a plot qua plot.

Actually, since I bring it up, it seemed like Marisa de los Santos was far more interested in the characters’ pasts than their presents, and that that was the book she was wanting to write, but instead she was writing this book. Cat is (um, spoilers, I guess?) absent for most of the book, and even though it’s clear that Pen and Will are crazy about her, and Marisa de los Santos is crazy about her, I never got to be, because I hardly saw her. It was hard to be invested in her, and hard to buy into the strength of the other characters’ investment. There was a lot of talk about how important these three people all were to each other, but I couldn’t see it in their personalities, the way I could with Cordelia and Teo in Love Walked In, or Cordelia and Clare in Belong to Me.

But the real source of my disappointment was this: I loved how self-aware Cordelia was in the other two books. That is a trait I really admire, and I thought Cordelia was exceptionally self-aware and thus pleasant to spend time with. Pen did not really possess that trait. The other characters spent a lot of time telling her what she was like, and, you know, I believe them because they know her, but I didn’t get that excellent click of recognition that happens when Flavian yells at Christopher in The Lives of Christopher Chant. I never felt like I knew her, so it was hard for me to sympathize when she felt sorry for herself. Which is, like, A LOT. A LOT of the time. I spent a lot of the book wishing she would put on her big girl panties and deal with it.

Hence, one of the primary joys of reading Marisa de los Santos, which is her ability to stick the landing in moments of high emotion, was not present when reading Falling Together. I direct you instead to Love Walked In and Belong to Me, inveterate emotional-moment landing-stickers, and then we can all settle down together to wait for Marisa de los Santos’s next book, which I faithfully believe will be awesome once more.

Thanks to HarperCollins for sending me this book for review!

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This was good.  Ms. de los Santos writes most truthfully about relationships.  The little girl was very interesting and intense.

I’d write more but I’m too busy trying to get school things done so that I can watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer later.

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