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I'll Be Your Blue Sky

A Novel

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

The New York Times bestselling author revisits the characters from her beloved novels Love Walked In and Belong to Me in this captivating, beautifully written drama involving family, friendship, secrets, sacrifice, courage, and true love for fans of Jojo Moyes, Elin Hilderbrand, and Nancy Thayer.

On the weekend of her wedding, Clare Hobbes meets an elderly woman named Edith Herron. During the course of a single conversation, Edith gives Clare the courage to do what she should have done months earlier: break off her engagement to her charming—yet overly possessive—fiancé.

Three weeks later, Clare learns that Edith has died—and has given her another gift. Nestled in crepe myrtle and hydrangea and perched at the marshy edge of a bay in a small seaside town in Delaware, Blue Sky House now belongs to Clare. Though the former guest house has been empty for years, Clare feels a deep connection to Edith inside its walls, which are decorated with old photographs taken by Edith and her beloved husband, Joseph.

Exploring the house, Clare finds two mysterious ledgers hidden beneath the kitchen sink. Edith, it seems, was no ordinary woman—and Blue Sky House no ordinary place. With the help of her mother, Viviana, her surrogate mother, Cornelia Brown, and her former boyfriend and best friend, Dev Tremain, Clare begins to piece together the story of Blue Sky House—a decades-old mystery more complex and tangled than she could have imagined. As she peels back the layers of Edith's life, Clare discovers a story of dark secrets, passionate love, heartbreaking sacrifice, and incredible courage. She also makes startling discoveries about herself: where she's come from, where she's going, and what—and who—she loves.

Shifting between the 1950s and the present and told in the alternating voices of Edith and Clare, I'll Be Your Blue Sky is vintage Marisa de los Santos—an emotionally evocative novel that probes the deepest recesses of the human heart and illuminates the tender connections that bind our lives.

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    • Library Journal

      November 1, 2017

      Clare Hobbes is at a Virginia hotel for her wedding to Zach. Her uncertainty must be showing because both her mother, Viviana, and her almost-mother Cornelia seem to be offering her a chance to opt out. But Clare loves Zach and knows that he is always trying to do the right thing. An elderly woman at the hotel clarifies things a bit more for Clare, who faces a huge decision. Edith Herron, whose own life unfolds in alternating chapters starting in 1949, was a young bride with a bright future when circumstances took a tragic turn. The story of Edith and Clare's connection slowly starts to take shape when Clare is bequeathed Edith's Delaware beachfront home, Blue Sky House, and its long-held secrets. VERDICT De los Santos (Love Walked In; Belong to Me) here revisits the next generation of her beloved characters, moving the family saga forward with this engrossing story of unshakable love, personal ethics, and a commitment to life's larger truths.--Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal

      Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 8, 2018
      Love and mystery surround a darker thread about the safety of women in this complex and moving tale by de los Santos (Love Walked In). The novel’s two plots begin, respectively, on the day of Edith Herron’s wedding to Joseph in 1950 and the day before Clare Hobbes’s marriage to Zach Barfield in the present. At the outset, Edith’s life is suffused with light, from the sun on the water near her beach home in Antioch Beach, Del., to the joy that she and Joseph share in their life together. Clare, on the other hand, is hesitant to wed Zach; she is given courage to call it off when, in a chance meeting, Edith advises her that “no one should live with someone who scares her.” Three weeks later, Clare escapes Zach by fleeing to Blue Sky House, left to her unexpectedly by Edith upon her death. It is there, with the help of Dev Tremain, Clare’s lifelong friend and onetime love, that Clare begins to piece together clues about Edith’s past and the fact that the house was once a secret shelter for women in abusive situations. In delving into Edith’s past at Blue Sky House, they also make more personal discoveries relevant to their present. The author doesn’t sugarcoat the violence that the women have suffered, but she balances those passages with soaring descriptions of everything from the saltwater marshes to Dev’s smile. This novel is both lovely and powerful.

    • Kirkus

      January 15, 2018
      Marital abuse is the central issue in de los Santos' (The Precious One, 2015, etc.) latest, which is made up of two intersecting stories: a contemporary woman is engaged to a man with possibly scary anger issues and, in the 1950s, another woman faces difficult choices after the death of her beloved husband.One day before Clare (who, along with other characters here, has appeared in previous de los Santos novels) is scheduled to marry good-looking lawyer Zach at a Virginia resort, an elderly stranger walks by while she's making centerpieces and says, "Courage, dear heart," which happens to be a quote from one of Clare's beloved Narnia books. The next morning, Clare finds herself talking in more depth to the stranger, Edith, who warns her not to live with someone who scares her. Already deeply apprehensive about marrying Zach because he has to work "so hard to be good," Clare takes Edith's advice and calls off the wedding. Edith dies shortly afterward and bequeaths her house on the Delaware coast to Clare. At loose ends after the non-wedding, Clare--who, unlike Zach, is naturally good as well as sensitive and loving--goes there to recover and to avoid Zach's borderline stalking. The novel moves back and forth between Clare's current romantic quandary and Edith's difficult life in the '50s: her idyllic but tragically brief marriage, her years as a young widow running a vacation boardinghouse, her affair with a handsome stranger from the city who involves her in his "relocation system" for women escaping abusive husbands, the risk she takes to help a young mother who has killed her violent husband in self-defense. Readers learn most of these details long before Clare figures them out, although her natural curiosity about Edith draws her and her best friend/former boyfriend, Dev, into Nancy Drew-like sleuthing. Their playful, increasingly romantic enjoyment of the adventure in uncovering Edith's past creates an odd contrast to the actual serious drama of Edith's life.De los Santos writes with disarming fluidity even when her plot takes far-fetched turns, but her heroine's inexhaustible perfection grows cloying.

      COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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