By Charity West
The Precious One by Marisa de Los Santos is the story of two daughters: the precious one and the one cast aside. The story starts as the rejected daughter, the elder daughter, gets a phone call from the father—asking her to come home.
This is the most recent book to keep me up all night. I started the book after dinner and could not convince myself to put it down until I’d turned the very last page at somewhere around six in the morning. (I’m not sure because I refused to look at the clock.) This book is not a thriller or a suspense novel, and yet it kept me riveted through a long night and into the morning. I love these nights, both because being absorbed in a book is a true gift and because I love trying to figure out later how the book managed to perform its spell on me. I’m sure I’ll be working out the puzzle of The Precious One for a long time (I’m a chronic re-reader), but I have figured out one way it kept me reading long into the night, and that is by consistently making me ask questions I wanted answers to.
Consider the opening sentence of the novel:
“If I hadn’t been alone in the house; if it hadn’t been early morning, with that specific kind of fuzzy early morning quiet and a sky the color of moonstones and raspberry jam outside my kitchen window; if I had gotten further than two sips into my bowl-sized mug of coffee; if he himself hadn’t called but had sent the message via one of his usual minions; if his voice had been his voice and not a dried-up, flimsy paring off the big golden apple of his baritone; if he hadn’t said “please,” if it had been a different hour in a different day entirely, maybe—just maybe—I would have turned him down.”
I mean, wow. Right? Okay, I know long, complicated sentences are not everyone’s cup of tea, but just look at everything de los Santos is doing in this paragraph. With her charming descriptions of the character’s morning, the “sky the color of moonstones and raspberry jam” and her “bowl-sized mug of coffee,” she makes us love this character instantly. The character (as yet unnamed, but who we’ll later learn is a woman named Eustacia, who goes by Taisy) feels like a real person, a person we’d like to be friends with.
And then she slips in the mystery: “he himself” called, and we’re asking who could this be? Who could warrant this lofty description? And he has minions, too? Now we really have to know who it is. Who does this lovely character, this person we’re already admiring and feeling an affinity for, wish she could have said no to? And what will happen because she wasn’t able to?
And so, with one expertly crafted sentence, the author has made us ask several questions and created a character we care enough about that we want to know the answer to those questions.
It’s not long before we learn some answers. At the end of the next paragraph we learn that the person Taisy wished she could have said no to is, in her words, “Wilson Cleary, professor, inventor, philanderer, self-made but reluctant millionaire, brilliant man, breathtaking jerk, my father.” And by the end of the chapter we learn that the father who so roundly rejected her eighteen years prior has had a heart attack and is asking her to come home for a visit. So we have some answers, but then more questions. How did these two become estranged? Why does he want her to come home now? Even as we’re getting answers, we’re asking more questions, and connecting with the character more and more.
And the novel is constantly doing this, slipping in tantalizing hints of mystery within the story of two unique and compelling women.
When we meet the other daughter, the titular “precious one,” we find out she’s starting high school in the middle of her junior year, after a lifetime of being homeschooled by the aforementioned “spectacular jerk.” Willow is hyper-intelligent, earnest, and instantly endearing. We’re led through a few anecdotes of her first painful days at school, sparking affinity and interest in her, and we learn that not only would she like to quit high school and teach herself, but she’d be wonderfully adept at it. But then, at the end of the first chapter in Willow’s perspective, we get this confession:
“He looked so sick, for one thing, not just pale but dingy, like old glue. … Even so, I might have said it all anyway. I might have planted my feet and looked him squarely in his tired, dull eyes and argued my case with a clear voice and a lot of quotes by people he admired. Except. Oh, except!
Except that what I knew, what I could never escape, what sat like a rock—not just a rock but a molten, seething, blistering rock, if you can imagine such a rock—inside my chest was this: It was all my fault. All. And at my lowest moments, I believed there was no punishment awful enough to balance what I’d done.”
-pg 23
Bam! We’re asking questions again. How could her father’s illness be her fault, or why does she believe this? Not to mention the question of how Wilson could have been one father to her: loving, protective, nurturing, and a completely different father to Taisy: cold, demanding, and distant.
It’s this combination of empathy and curiosity that worked the spell on me. It kept me up all night because I simply had to know. Not just the answers to the questions, but I had to know if these two women were going to be okay. I had to see how it was all going to work out. This is what every good book does to its readers, whether it’s a romance, a space opera, a thriller, or a seemingly quiet story about a broken family. For an excellent study in hooking the reader on every page, I highly recommend The Precious One by Marisa de los Santos.