Falling Together by Marisa de los Santos

Falling Together by Marisa de los Santos
Published October 2012 by HarperCollins Publishers
Source: my copy courtesy of TLC Book Tours and the publisher in exchange for this review

Synopsis from the publisher:

It's been six years since Pen Calloway watched Cat and Will, her best friends from college, walk out of her life. Through the birth of her daughter, the death of her father, and the vicissitudes of single motherhood, she has never stopped missing them. When, after years of silence, Cat—the bewitching, charismatic center of their group—urgently requests that the three meet at their college reunion, Pen can't refuse. But instead of a happy reconciliation, what awaits is a collision of past and present that sends Pen and Will on a journey around the world, with Pen's five-year-old daughter and Cat's hostile husband in tow. And as Pen and Will struggle to uncover the truth about Cat, they find more than they bargained for: startling truths about who they were before and who they are now.

My review:

De los Santos is the author of Love Walked In and Belong to Me. I have them both; I haven't read either of them. So I can't tell you whether or not you're going to like this one because you liked those or dislike this one because you disliked one or the other of those. What I can tell you is that I liked this book...a lot. I think as much for the fact that it was a book that came into my hands at just the right time. I have not read a strictly women's fiction book for quite a while now and I was due. Plus this is a book about so many of the things I love a book to be about, friendship and family, plus de los Santos throws in a bit of mystery to make things interesting.

The characters in Falling Together felt real to me, maybe not exactly the kind of relationships I myself had/have but the kinds of relationships I imagine I would like to have had. As so many books do, this has, perhaps, a bit too much thrown in. It's not enough, for example, that Pen has a child, out of wedlock. Instead she has to have had her daughter with a man who was going through a divorce but ends up back with his wife and Pen ever after has to deal with the wife who hates her because she and Patrick had this child together. But I enjoyed de los Santos' writing enough to forgive her this and a plot that seemed to go on a little too long (again, as I so often find, a book that could have done with a bit  more editing to make it a little tighter). And I will, finally, get the other two books pulled out of where ever they are and get them read...although I may save them to read at just the right time so that I can enjoy them as much as I enjoyed this one.

To read other reviews of Falling Together, check out other reviews on the full tour. Thanks to the ladies at TLC Book Tours for including me on this tour.