I'll Be Your Blue Sky
A Novel
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4.3 • 18 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
