Watch Us Shine

De Los Santos revisits Cornelia Brown, heroine of Love Walked In, for a saccharine story of a mother’s mysterious past. Cornelia, 44, is reeling after a man held a gun to her younger child’s head in a grocery store. After she learns her mother, Eleanor, has been hit by a car, she packs up her two kids and drives south with her husband to Virginia to care for her. While Eleanor recovers in a rehab center, her memory begins to falter and she requests of Cornelia, “Bring me the northern lights.” Baffled, Cornelia realizes how little she knows about her mother and enlists her sister and a friend to help understand the request. Flashbacks to the 1960s reveal details about Eleanor’s sister, a kindhearted painter named Martha who writes to Eleanor about her boyfriend, who invites her to move with him to a utopian community of artists and writers. As Cornelia discovers a dark side to the utopia, she wrestles with the feeling that she can’t protect her children from the dangers of the world. Unfortunately, the author’s flatly drawn characters are depicted as either good or evil, and the cutesy conceits tend to grate. This one’s for diehards only. Agent: Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency. (June)