Marisa de los Santos, bestselling author of Love Walked In and Belong to Me, joined LLF today to talk about her upcoming novel, I'll Be Your Blue Sky, and to share some library love. I'll Be Your Blue Sky is a beautifully written story of one woman's mysterious inheritance of a seaside Delaware house with captivating secrets hidden within its walls. Revisiting characters from her previous novels, I'll Be Your Blue Sky is sure to delight fans new and old. It is also one of our top picks for the March LibraryReads list! The deadline to vote—January 20th—is right around the corner, so hurry on over to Edelweiss to download the egalley! I'll Be Your Blue Sky goes on sale March 6th.
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Here’s a secret about my books: they’re full of love letters.
Not from one character to another; I’m not sure there’s a single one of that sort in any of my novels. The ones I mean are from me to the small, bright things of the world that I love, the things that make me love the world. If I’d read my books back in graduate school and had written a paper on them, on the Marisa de los Santos canon, I would maybe have called these love letters "recurring imagery" or "grace notes" or even "authorial obsessions" (I was not the most original grad-school-paper writer) because they appear over and over; some of them are in every or nearly every book. Sometimes the love letters are a passing reference, a flicker—one slender sentence—others are intrinsic to plot or character; some are miniature stories; others sing like tiny hymns. And like the best love letters, they are also thank you notes, to the things themselves and to the universe for allowing them to exist.
What do I write these love letters to? Books from my childhood; classic movies; E.M. Forster; cheese; Adirondack chairs; Charlottesville, Virginia; white flowers; brown eyes; neighborhoods; blossoming trees; car rides; street lamps; old houses. And libraries. Little love letters to libraries are slipped into the pocket of almost every book I’ve written.
In I’ll Be Your Blue Sky, my character Clare Hobbes inherits a house from a woman named Edith, a woman with whom Clare has had only one conversation (although it was a conversation that would change her life). Almost as soon as she arrives at the house, Clare begins to understand that Edith had been no ordinary woman, and she feels compelled to search for answers about Edith, about her house and her life. This search takes her, as so many searches do, to the local library.
Clare begins her description of that trip this way: "The Antioch Beach library was like something out of a good dream, if you’re the kind of person who dreams about libraries, which I am…" I am, too, and that library is really the stuff of my dreams, spun from memory, nostalgia, and wishes. It’s entirely invented, with its heavy red door, its pale gray stone, its librarian with her two sets of glasses and her sudden transformation into radiance when Clare asks her for help, but it feels as real to me as anyplace I’ve ever been. And it’s magical in the way that all libraries are, full of stories and answers and rustling. Clare describes the rustling by saying it was "part page turning, part whispering, part shushing, part quietly shuffling feet, part just the books and people breathing." She says, "[T]his library was like a dovecote, like a forest in autumn, like a roomful of dancers in tutus."
I hope it exists. I mean it does exist inside the book. But I hope it exists in real life, too. I hope that I find it in some seaside town somewhere. When I do, I’ll tug open the red door, walk inside, and just stand for a minute, listening. Then, I’ll find a book and I’ll sit down and I’ll open the book and start to read.
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Thanks, Marisa! I'll Be Your Blue Sky goes on sale March 6th, so make sure to grab the egalley from Edelweiss and dive in before it hits shelves! Voting ends for the March LibraryReads list on January 20th.
-Chris
