Belong to Me -Marisa de los Santos
Heartfelt Story of Everyday Life – Love, Lies, and Laughter.
Love Walked In best selling author Marisa de los Santos's novel is a heartbreaking and honest story about finding where you belong.
Cornelia Brown is a big city girl. First a resident of Philadelphia, then New York City, she identified with the city and even considered it an extension of herself. But after two years, she began to feel consumed by the sheer size of the urban area she called home, and suggested to her husband Matteo (Teo) that they move to the suburbs, starting a new life together that's anything but what she expected.
A New Life
Cornelia and Teo begin their new life in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where Cornelia imagines all the women form a union of female-ness that almost makes them all interchangeable. She pictures chats over the back yard fence, block parties and dinners, with their children happily running around among them. What she finds, however, is quite different. She blunders her first dinner party with what she thinks is a clever remark, but instead the others in attendance completely misunderstood and Piper, the queen bee of the neighborhood clique, leaves Cornelia feeling like a heel.
Finding Where They Belong
Each of the three seemingly separate stories told in Belong to Me all culminate to a satisfying, if surprising, ending. Cornelia and Teo’s happy marriage is suddenly complicated with a twist that changes both their lives. They had known each other since childhood, and began dating after college, but each one learns more about each other while living in the suburbs than they ever had known before.
Blond haired, blue eyed Piper Truitt is the proverbial suburban housewife, bringing freshly baked cookies to the new neighbors’ house and making sure that everything is done just so. But when her best friend Elizabeth is diagnosed with cancer, it challenges all she believes in.
Veronica “Lake” Tremain moves with her thirteen year old son Dev to the suburban neighborhood but won’t give Dev an explanation why. Dev is a genius and in his new school skips ahead two grades to become the youngest ninth grader at the high school. He soon meets Clare, a girl whom Cornelia and Teo took in after her mother abandoned her during a particularly difficult bipolar disorder episode. She believes that certain people can change the way that time moves, and she and Dev form a relationship that proves it.
Heartfelt and Honest
Marisa de los Santos’ novel is a heartfelt and sometimes painful look at belonging. Characters are well developed and interesting, and the story is told with prose that is almost poetic at times.
de los Santos, Marisa
Belong to Me
New York, William Morrow, April 1, 2008
