I'll Be Your Blue Sky: A Novel

Great story, wonderful writing style. Descriptive enough to make you really see and feel the scene, but done with perfect word choices so it’s never dull. Love all the characters, flaws included. She writes human nature with kindness and hope.

The story was somewhat predictable; that said, I enjoyed the book mostly because the author described every character to perfection. After reading the book, I felt like I knew these people and places.

The story was somewhat predictable; that said, I enjoyed the book mostly because the author described every character to perfection. After reading the book, I felt like I knew these people and places.

I really liked this book. It has mystery, love, family issues and people overcoming life's hardships. It is one you don't want to put down. My only complaint would be the changing back in forth in time and character with each chapter. Sometimes I had to back up to understand what I was reading.

Has there ever been a more consistently brilliant writer? (Except for Kristin Hannah of course.) Marisa de los Santos leaves me breathless and wanting more. Her imagery is clever and tactile. Her characters are so smart I can barely understand them sometimes, but I love them. I just want to climb into the worlds she creates and live there a while! Thank you Ms. de la Santos!!

Driven by a convoluted plot that doesn't work, this novel lacks the character development and emotional complexity I valued in de los Santos's other work. A third of the novel is devoted to weakly drawn characters telling or discovering a mystery that is so confusing and changing, the characters are repeatedly simply telling what happened. Because the author structures paragraphs and details artfully, the novel does not read badly page by page, however it is a failure as a complete work. I found myself skimming the artful writing to make sense of the ridiculous plot. My impression is that Marisa had three different promising novels partially written in her computer and forced them together into this awkward mess to satisfy the demands of her publisher. Many detail are jarring; for example: She has Edith saying "I'm in" in the 1950's when this slang comes much later. I think many of us loved her work because of the profound reassurance of the possibilities of love. This novel instead presumably focuses on abuse and personality disordered people yet it fails to capture the emotional reality of such relationships and family patterns and instead retreats into sentimentality in the depiction of the Dev and Clare relationship. Such a disappointment. If Marisa can learn about cluster B personality disorders and narcissists, she may have a truly profound novel in her. This novel fails to do justice to the effects of abuse and trauma bonding, and to what a true struggle for freedom entails. As such it is emotionally irresponsible in addition to structurally flawed.

Lovely story of two women- Clare and Edith- told in two time frames- the 1950s and today. Edith, after a brief but critical meeting, leaves Clare her home in Delaware, a home where she had not lived for many years. Why she hasn't lived there and how the women are linked beyond their short meeting is at the root of this well written novel that will draw you in. The earlier books in this trilogy are many books ago for me and I'd largely forgotten the details of Clare's life (and that of Cornelia) so this was pretty much a standalone for me. Things felt a tad tangled early on but de los Santos does give you enough info to make it clear who's who and how they are related. Love but also domestic violence is at the core of the plot. You might find some of it disturbing. That said, you'll also find Edith to be a hero, as is John, the police chief. Getting Clare and Dev to the secret might be a tad complicated and some of the linkages a little forced but I very much enjoyed this. Thanks to Edelweiss for the ARC. This is good old fashioned story telling with well rounded characters.

Ah... what a perfectly satisfying emotional read. I'll be Your Blue Sky is the third book in Marisa de los Santos' Love Walked In books. I've become invested in the characters in these books and especially loved Clare and Dev. Yet this book starts off from the viewpoint of Edith, and that was good, because very quickly I was invested in her story too. And what an amazing story it is.

Edith and Clare meet on the eve of Clare's wedding to Zach, and Edith listens and shares wisdom with Clare. Meanwhile I am thinking - how on earth did Clare link up with Zach? And what happened to Dev? Come on, those two are made for each other. And then Clare tells the story of how that happened, and I think - how could she!

Well Clare comes to the same conclusion - and later on learning that Edith, on her death, has left her a house, she goes there and follows some clues found there to reveal more to her about Edith and her life. What follows is a whole journey that reveals Edith's courageous and loving life, and the risks she took. Clare in following up on the clues and meeting up with the people who can give her answers finds her own safe place, her own blue sky, her own self.

This is a love story, a real love story, not a romance. It tells of love and heartbreak, of rightness and wrongness. It is beautifully written, the journey and clues crafted down to the smallest details. It takes us back to the 1950's when things were a little harsher socially, society still was not ready to help battered women, but there were people who were willing to help at a cost to themselves

This was a very satisfying read, yes you could easily read it as a stand alone, however I'd highly recommend you read in order - Love Walked In, Belong to Me and then I'll Be Your Blue Sky.

This book has a captivating story plus beautiful writing and a protagonist I really liked. I wanted to sit and keep reading for hours on end and resented when real life got in the way and made me put down the book.

At the beginning, I couldn't understand why Clare would get to the weekend of her wedding and need to make a list of why she should marry Zach. It seemed as if she shouldn't have gotten engaged in the first place. As the story progresses, I realized more about the relationship and the emotional dynamic involved. I started to think she shouldn't have continued dating him, much less gotten engaged but also understood why she had done so. As the story continued I understood much more why her conversations with Edith were so important.

This is a book you will want to sink into and savor your reading. You will want to keep reading it but not be in a hurry to finish it. It was emotionally satisfying and enjoyable. A big part of that is the beautiful, lyrical writing. I enjoyed the way it was written as much as I enjoyed the story -- or maybe I enjoyed the story so much because of how it was written.

Interesting characters and plot. I never felt totally transported to the Blue Sky Inn - maybe I was looking forward to “seeing and feeling” it too much. If what you are looking for is a good romance, that’s what this is, starting off with choosing the wrong guy, an inheritance out of the blue, intermingled with some time spent saving abused women, and a conclusion that requires you to suspend belief, and make notes to keep things straight. The ending is so tangled that the author has a character explain it to us several times. It bounces back and forth from present day to the 1950’s to tell the tale.
I may have suffered as a result of not having read previous books, as I understand that this may contain characters who are well known to readers, so perhaps the events of this story seem more plausible to fans of this writer.