Love Walked In

When a book and performance try this hard to be loved, there's only one thing you can do: refuse. Both book and narrator (at least, in the case of Alma Cuervo) aim to be found so sweet as to be irresistible. The story concerns Cornelia Brown, the charming, underemployed 31-year old manager of a Philadelphia coffeehouse, who believes romance should imitate THE PHILADELPHIA STORY. Through a series of events, she becomes the care-giver of 11-year-old Clare, daughter of her boyfriend and his ex-wife. Cuervo voices chapters narrated by Cornelia, and Jenny Ikeda--far more restrained--takes the ones narrated by Clare as the story twists to its sugary conclusion. M.O. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

September 12, 2005
Philadelphia cafe manager Cornelia Brown drifts effortlessly through her unattached life, unapologetic for idealizing romance and breathlessly recommending The Philadelphia Story
—to the reader and everyone else. Eleven-year-old Clare is a child of divorce whose mother, a successful party planner, is quickly going to pieces. In alternating chapters of Cornelia's first person and Clare's free and direct third, poet de los Santos, making her novel debut, tells the story of their finding each other. That Cornelia, early on, immediately falls for Cary Grant doppelgänger Martin Grace is no surprise; his relation to Clare, revealed a third of the way in, isn't really either. As she discovers maternal instincts she wasn't sure she had, Cornelia works up the courage to face her own feelings for Clare with honesty. As Martin exits, Cornelia's childhood friend Teo enters, but neither makes much impact, and Clare's rather serious issues get reduced to Clare-did-this, Clare-thought-that episodes. The two main characters exist for one purpose: to enact a cross-generational, strong-but-vulnerable-and-loving, screenplay-ready femininity. Chick lit? You bet: with rights sold in at least eight countries, and, indeed, to Paramount—Sarah Jessica Parker will star and coproduce with Sideways
's Michael London. The book is fine, but for this property, it's a case of waiting for Carrie to walk in.