Book Review #4 - "Belong to Me" by Marisa de los Santos

**Warning** This book review contains a spoiler, albeit a small one, but if you hate knowing any of the ending of a book, just let me tell you that this is the best book I've read in years and now stop reading my blog and go out immediately, get this book and devour it.

This is a fabulously written book. I am in love with this book. This is the kind of book you go out and buy a copy of, even though you've already read it -you simply have to have a copy in your own personal possession. This is the kind of book that you almost don't want to read too fast, because you can't bear for it to end.

The novel centers on the lives of three very different women, Cornelia, Lake and Piper. At times heartbreaking, it is at the same time a very funny book. What really makes this book though is that de los Santos can just plain write. Her descriptions are so accurate and beautiful. Without reaching or trying to hard she captures the human experience perfectly. As I was reading I kept thinking, "this is the passage I want to post on my blog". By then end I had about 20 different passages marked. What I will share is from the end of the novel where Cornelia is describing the birth of her child. (Lily, this is dedicated to you as you are so soon to go through this experience again. When I read this I thought, yes this is exactly how it is.)

"What struck be about the rest of it was how little I mattered. A vehicle, a means, of someone else's act of becoming. If that sounds like a complaint, it isn't one. All I'm saying is that, from the very first push, I saw to what end I labored, not delivery, depositing a gift to me and Teo on the doorstep of our lives, but deliverance, the baby freed, pushed loose and streaming, like God, into the world.

The first time I looked at the face of my child, I didn't think "my child." I made no claims. Transported by awe to someplace way past tenderness, I was courteous and grave, one fierce creature greeting another, newly arrived. Then Teo said, "Our daughter, Cor, our little girl," and -wham -I bought the complete package:tenderness, yes; devotion and longing, euphoria and despair; ache and work and rage and boundless gratitude. My girl and I got it backward, backward and right. She did the claiming. I was delivered, unto her. "You are mine," she cried, her hands reaching for my face, and nothing was ever more true."