“Sometimes, happiness feels so fragile…So what do we do about it?…Live. Forget that it’s fragile. Live like it isn’t”

You know how sometimes you’ll read a book and think, “This seems like it would be a really great movie one day?” The impression I kept getting from reading Marisa de los Santos’s Belong to Me, is that it would make a really good television series. Her characters are so incredibly well fleshed out and just seemed like such real people. And while there is plot to keep things moving, I really just wanted to spend more time with the characters. It would make for a great few seasons of television, set in a beautiful neighborhood populated with a fascinating cast of characters.

“But some things, no matter how unlikely, are just supposed to happen. You know what I mean. Some things just smack of the future and feel part of an overarching rightness.”

Belong to Me is the sequel of a previous novel, but you don’t need to read it in order to follow the events of this one. In this book, Cornelia and her husband Teo to have moved to a new Suburban neighborhood. She struggles to make new friends, while we see that a few other women in the neighborhood have personal struggles of their own. We also meet young, incredibly bright boy named Dex who has suddenly been transplanted by his single mother to a new school. Dex is trying to fit in while simultaneously searching for a reason why his mother suddenly moved them. He’s never known his father and becomes convinced that his father must live in this new town.

There’s a lot going on here, a lot of storylines that move around and interact with each other. But the best part is the characters. They change and grow over time, and people that you can’t stand in the beginning turned out to be some of your favorites. I have yet to read a book by this author that I haven’t liked, and this was probably one of my favorites.