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A review by snowmaiden
Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos
5.0
This book came out in 2005, and it's been on my to-read list since early 2013, one of the first books I ever added on Goodreads. (Don't ask me what my reason was for adding it over 8 years ago, because I really don't have any idea.) I only decided to read it now because I was looking at a list of books for springtime reading, and another book by this author was on there. (The joke was on me, because it turns out this particular novel is set during the Christmas season!) And yet, as so often happens with me, I feel I came to this book at exactly the right time.
The prose in this novel is like a dream. (I marked a ridiculous number of quotes, and I could have marked many, many more. I just love the voice of the narrator, Cornelia. She seems like an old friend who's whispering all her secrets in my ear.) The plotting, on the other hand, is kind of crazy. There are times when the author needed something to happen, and there is absolutely no logical reason on earth why that thing would happen, but she drives a bulldozer straight through all the obstacles and just makes it happen anyway. Ordinarily that kind of thing would drive me crazy, but for this book, I'm prepared to make an exception.
I guess what I loved most is the feeling that the book gave me. So many romance novels are "fantasy machines," as an English professor of mine once memorably called them. You put a couple of people in, you turn the crank, and out comes true love. This book, although shelved in the romance section of my local library, isn't like that at all, in spite of all the contrived plotting. It's about what happens when you put two people in the fantasy machine and what comes out isn't true romantic love, but something infinitely more complicated and wonderful. It's about real-life love and how it's both much better and much worse than our silly romantic dreams. Most of all, it's about how, to paraphrase the Rolling Stones, "You can't always get what you want, but you get what you need."
This book has been waiting so long for me to read it, and maybe it's because it's taken me this long to be ready for it. I hope I can live up to the lessons it has taught me about bravery and honesty.
The prose in this novel is like a dream. (I marked a ridiculous number of quotes, and I could have marked many, many more. I just love the voice of the narrator, Cornelia. She seems like an old friend who's whispering all her secrets in my ear.) The plotting, on the other hand, is kind of crazy. There are times when the author needed something to happen, and there is absolutely no logical reason on earth why that thing would happen, but she drives a bulldozer straight through all the obstacles and just makes it happen anyway. Ordinarily that kind of thing would drive me crazy, but for this book, I'm prepared to make an exception.
I guess what I loved most is the feeling that the book gave me. So many romance novels are "fantasy machines," as an English professor of mine once memorably called them. You put a couple of people in, you turn the crank, and out comes true love. This book, although shelved in the romance section of my local library, isn't like that at all, in spite of all the contrived plotting. It's about what happens when you put two people in the fantasy machine and what comes out isn't true romantic love, but something infinitely more complicated and wonderful. It's about real-life love and how it's both much better and much worse than our silly romantic dreams. Most of all, it's about how, to paraphrase the Rolling Stones, "You can't always get what you want, but you get what you need."
This book has been waiting so long for me to read it, and maybe it's because it's taken me this long to be ready for it. I hope I can live up to the lessons it has taught me about bravery and honesty.