Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos

Title: Belong to Me
Author: Marisa de los Santos
# pages: 388
Date published: 2008
Genre: fiction
Challenge(s): July Book Blowout, Raved About Reads

Rating:

(highly recommended)

Setting: suburb of Pittsburg

First Sentence:

“My fall from suburban grace, or, more accurately, my failure to achieve the merest molehill of suburban grace for which to fall, began with a dinner party and a perfectly innocent, modestly clever, and only faintly quirky remark about Armand Assante.”

If you have not read Love Walked In by de los Santos and you intend to, the following synopsis may contain spoilers for that book – So look away NOW! ;>).

Synopsis: Belong to Me picks up a couple of years after Love Walked In left off. Cornelia and Teo are settling in to a new life in the suburbs, but Cornelia isn’t making friends all that easily. Piper, Cornelia’s wasp-tongued, perky, perfect across-the-street neighbor, is everything die-hard, city-dweller Cornelia was afraid she was going to find in suburbia. Just when things are looking bleak friendship-wise, Cornelia meets Lake. New to town, with her genius, fourteen-year-old son, Dev, in tow, Lake and Cornelia hit it off and quickly become friends. But not everyone in town is who they seem to be.

Random Thoughts: I loved Belong to Me just as much as I did Love Walked In. De los Santos does a wonderful job with her characters. In Piper, she was able to take a thoroughly unlikable character and turn her into someone I could care about. But my favorite character was Dev. How could I not like a 14-year-old boy that is obsessed with science? ;>) I’m looking forward to other books by her in the future.

Favorite quotes:

“That night, Dev sat at the dinner table wolfing down white bean and chicken chili, his favorite, and tried to come up with the best way to spin the job idea so that Lake would go for it. Actually, he was 99.9 percent sure Lake was spin proof. Lake didn’t’ just have a built-in bullshit detector, she had a state-of-the-art, atom-splitting bullshit annihilator.” (p. 64)

Lake, telling Cornelia about Dev when he was small:

“Lake sighed. “Sometimes I felt like his brain was this hungry, pacing animal, and I had to keep throwing it chunks of meat.”” (p. 99)

“He gave Rafferty a surreptitious once-over: the right age, blue eyes, straight medium brown hair, maybe five ten, attached earlobes (Dev’s were unattached, but so were Lake’s, so no problem there), no widow’s peak or cleft chin (ditto Dev). Nothing obvious to cancel him out on the basis of phenotype.” (p. 270)

If you haven’t read Belong to Me and you intend to – LOOK AWAY NOW! The following quote is a SPOILER!! You’ve been warned ;>). But this is absolutely my favorite quote from Dev, so I couldn’t leave it out.

Cornelia has just finished telling Dev that she wishes she could be in the womb with Penny. Be “where the action is.” Dev replies:

“But you are there, right? I mean, you’re the there were Penny is.” He looked up at me and said, “How cool. To be someone’s there.” (p. 216)

How cool, indeed.

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