Review: Falling Together by Marisa de los Santos

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Falling Together

by Marisa de los Santos

Fiction
William Morrow Paperbacks; October 2, 2012 (reprint)
Paperback
384 pages

From the back cover:

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.

Falling Together is a story about friendship and love and the ways in which relationships can evolve. It’s a story about holding on and letting go, and knowing when to do so. The main theme of Falling Together seems to be the idea that even when we need to let loved ones go from our lives physically, we can still hold on to them in our hearts and our memories, where they can live indefinitely if we so choose–”gone but not gone.”

This is a pretty good book; I read it in a little over a day. The storyline flows well, although Falling Together is more character and idea-based than it is plot-based. I found most of the characters to be sympathetic, although I didn’t find myself connecting with any of them personally. Pen was a bit irritating: she was quite self-centered and seemed to think that everything she didn’t like was a personal affront. The fact that Cat and Will could tolerate that over years of friendship says a lot about their characters and how much they must have loved her. My favorite character was Cat because she seemed to be the most believable to me.

While I liked a lot of the feelings and ideas put forth in Falling Together, as a whole it was a little too mushy for me. The ending was a little too “and they lived happily ever after,” which is not something I can always get into. I believe in love and romance wholeheartedly, but sometimes it feels a bit too forced or fake in fiction. Throughout most of Falling Together the relationships and their evolutions felt solid, but the end was too mushy in the larger context of the book.

That is not to say I didn’t enjoy reading Falling Together, because I did. It just didn’t give me all the feelings like I think the author intended. I liked it, and I’m sure there are lots of people out there who will love it.

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(To learn more about Marisa de los Santos, please visit her author bio on the HarperCollins website.)

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I received a copy of this book from the publisher, through TLC Book Tours, in exchange for an honest review.