LOVE WALKED IN
By Marisa de los Santos
Publisher: Viking, 307 pages
(ISBN: 978-0670916177)

I’m not normally a fan of chicklit but I loved this book. In fact, if I hadn’t lent it to someone practically the moment I finished reading it, I’d be rereading it now.

Here’s why I like it so much:

1. It makes me happy and peaceful and thoughtful. How many chicklit novels do that?

2. The heroine Cornelia Brown is kind and gracious and her head is screwed on the right way round and ever so securely. I like heroines you can admire and imagine as your best friend. I do not like heroines who are neurotic about their weight and obsessed with finding a man, and do stupid things like run up huge debts cos they are shopaholics, or lie in order to get a date. Nothing worse than a desperate woman. Brown is not desperate. Quite the opposite.

3. The other heroine, Clare, who is eleven and lovely, vulnerable and adorable.

4. One of the male leads, a beautiful man called Mateo Sandoval who also happens to be sensitive, smart and generous in all ways. And he’s straight!

5. The unpredictable storyline: Cornelia meets the man of her dreams (a Cary Grant lookalike). She then meets his daughter. And …? I’m not saying the ending comes out of nowhere and bites you in the bum: As you turn the pages and learn more about the characters, you begin to see and suspect how things might turn out, but it’s never ever a dead cert. De los Santos keeps you in suspense and guessing all the way, and the ending is one that leaves room for all kinds of wonderful possibilities and developments. I hope she writes a sequel. (29th August, 2016: She did, but I didn’t like it.)