This one book on the shelves of human evolution...

To open the figurative page of this post I'd like to quote page 307 of Marisa de los Santos' Belong To Me: "When you considered the whole of human history, which Dev knew was a speck, a subatomic particle in an atom of a microbe on a flea clinging to the colossal breathing animal of the cosmos, which was itself a speck floating on the endlessly deep, endlessly long river of spacetime blah blah blah, the event was tiny. The event was quantum." That's what I'd like to say about this book. On the shelves of the world where there's something around eight new books published a day - the data imprint it takes up is an infinitesimal event. Belong To Me, however, reads like a magnanimous one.

Perhaps it's my geeky B.S. English background. She mentions my most favorite poem of all time. And in such a fun, humorous, cute way. Perhaps she mentions old movies I've been watching lately like Streetcar Named Desire and ones that yummy Cary Grant plays in, and that just so easily reels me in. It couldn't be because she laces her quick and witty prose with references to great authors and works of literature in such pretty text to get this bibliophile panting. This author knows what she's doing in getting a booklover's engines running; she's got a Ph.D. in literature and wields her art with such intoxicating flair!

She creates characters who have tensions between each other and they end up loving each other despite themselves. She's got lovable characters in the guise of control freaks and beautiful midget women (really, just a short woman, like so many in my own family). There's a genius fourteen-year-old boy who possesses the art of skillful, intellectual conversation better than a team of engineering cunning linguists (the discussions on Darwin, Robert Frost, and string theory are delicious and precious hearing them from the lens of such a young sprout). Also in the mix is a lying, trickster Coyote-woman you can't help but love in the end... but still so glad you get to see her falling to pieces in tears.

There's a variety of human stages passed through intimately: first love, betrayal, enduring love, untimely death, the beauty of childhood, unconventional trysts, and the surprising unity of relationships despite the foibles that humans all too frequently bring to the table, despite all of our expounded upon evolutionary progress.

She gives her characters all the dimensions to match up to the high literature alluded to in metaphor, and makes this bibliophile delighted to discover upon reading the last page that there's a prequel to this book, even though it stands apart strongly on its own. What a pleasurable delight in reading!