Girlfriends Sunday Book Review

by Judy Merrill Larsen

I fell in love with Marisa de los Santos when I read her first novel, LOVE WALKED IN.  It’s pretty darn near perfect.  Then I read BELONG TO ME which had me swooning.  Her characters are flawed, funny, smart and I’m dying to run into them in my own real life.  So, you can imagine how tickled I was to grab onto FALLING TOGETHER (which will be out in paperback next month, but you probably don’t want to wait!).  Once again, de los Santos captures the little moments that make up our lives, and shows how they shape and define the bigger moments in ways we never expect and can't predict.

“It’s been six years since Pen Calloway watched Cat and Will, her best friends from college, walk out of her life. Through the birth of her daughter, the death of her father, and the vicissitudes of single motherhood, she has never stopped missing them. When, after years of silence, Cat—the bewitching, charismatic center of their group—urgently requests that the three meet at their college reunion, Pen can’t refuse. But instead of a happy reconciliation, what awaits is a collision of past and present that sends Pen and Will on a journey around the world, with Pen’s five-year-old daughter and Cat’s hostile husband in tow. And as Pen and Will struggle to uncover the truth about Cat, they find more than they bargained for: startling truths about who they were before and who they are now.”

These are people you’ll think about when you’re going about your day–wondering what they’re going to say and do next all the while you’re trying to figure out what you’d do in their shoes.  As I watched them reconnect (or try to) with each other and deal with the hurts and slights of the past, I couldn’t help but think about my own journey from college and into adulthood and the words I wished I might have said or left unsaid.  Pen and Will and Cat feel so real and the ending is so true to them (which of course doesn’t mean everything is all hunky-dory peachy-keen) that it was incredibly satisfying and I even felt the urge to start all over from the beginning and savor their journey one more time.

Is there someone you’d like to reconnect with?  What would you tell him or her?

(Previously published at BookEnd Babes)