Welcome!

[MarisadelosSan…]

Dear Readers,

While my first novel, Love Walked In, was set in Philadelphia, my second, Belong to Me is set in a distant, unnamed suburb of this same city. I've fielded some questions lately about why this is so. Why would I choose the suburbs as a setting for my book when there are so many sparkling, fascinating, teeming-with-life cities in the world from which to choose? I love cities; I do. They are sparkling. They are fascinating. And there are many compelling reasons to live in a city, countless reasons. But as I considered the question of why the suburbs, what I come up with is that there are many reasons to move to a big city, but nearly every last person who moves to the suburbs does so for a single reason: to make a home. And that is very
moving to me.

In Belong to Me, that may be the one thing all of my many, very different characters have in common: they are all searching for a home. They are searching for a physical home, a warm, safe, crickets-chirping-at-night place to raise their children, and they are searching for the people who make up their small, fiercely
protected, vitally important world. I think they all find homes, but these homes don't look like anything any of them have expected. They get thrown for loops, all of them, and possibly, by the end of the story, they would all claim themselves better off for it.

Now, my book has a home with you, and I couldn't be more thrilled by that. I hope you love reading it.

Yours,
Marisa de los Santos