Marisa de los Santos’ Love Walked In owes its heritage to classic romantic movies, though it’s not, I assure you, a romance novel. It’s more a novel about love – how it happens, how it doesn’t, what it does to us, and what we do for it.
A synopsis:
When Martin Grace enters the hip Philadelphia coffee shop Cornelia Brown manages, her life changes forever. But little does she know that her newfound love is only the harbinger of greater changes to come. Meanwhile, across town, Clare Hobbs—eleven years old and abandoned by her erratic mother—goes looking for her lost father. She crosses paths with Cornelia while meeting with him at the café, and the two women form an improbable friendship that carries them through the unpredictable currents of love and life.
The book jacket explains that de los Santos is an award-winning poet, and I can see that through her writing of this novel. The story is written partially through Cornelia’s first-person account of her life – her voice is quirky, honest, rich, and totally engaging. The other half of the story is told in third-person omniscient around Clare, a young girl unexpectedly introduced into Cornelia’s life. The see-sawing of storytelling could have been a disaster, but de los Santos handles it very well and quite seamlessly.
There are numerous references in the novel to classic movies, almost so many that you need a “suggested viewing guide” at the end in order to catch up with the main characters. Films like The Philadelphia Story, any Cary Grant flick, even some with Bette Davis or Veronica Lake or Grace Kelley will do. The continuous references create a type of atmosphere itself in the novel, and you do start to see the characters in a sort of faded-edges, backlit kind of way. The author throws in enough language and a couple of sexual encounters to make the book contemporary, though. And everything isn’t always tidy or done with a soaring soundtrack.
Love Walked In is a lovely combination of simple and austere, yet complicated and heartbreaking. I found myself emotionally involved with the characters and ultimately wished that these were the types of people less likely to be found on the pages of a book – or maybe a movie set – and more likely to be found in the everyday world around me. What I CAN take away from the novel is Cornelia’s conclusion about life: “A real life isn’t getting what you want; the achievement, the privilege, too, is knowing what you love.”
BOOK:30 