Customer Reviews

The Stuff That Never Happened: A Novel

5 star:		(42)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is one of the most satisfying novels I've read in a long time. Light years beyond chick lit, wise, and worldly. It's so refreshing to find a novel whose characters feel like real people, not folks you might see on a made-for-TV movie. Annabelle and Grant love each other deeply, but the glue that holds their marriage together might not be enough once the kids are (mostly) grown. The new emptiness in their house begins to fill up with dangerous thoughts and emotions related to an earlier, difficult time in their life together, a time they have agreed never to speak of again. This chapter in their marriage becomes "the stuff that never happened." It did happen, though, and when a new crisis in their lives threatens to break through the silence, Annabelle and Grant have to face the ramifications of keeping their mutual secret.

This book is one of the best novels I have read in years (and I read A LOT!). It starts off very subtley as you wonder why on earth Annabelle and Grant ever got married in the first place and then how the marriage has lasted for 26 years. Through brilliant interweaving of the late 70's when the two main characters first met one another and the mid-2000's as they are empty nesters, we gradually learn and come to understand the dynamics of a long term marriage and to really care about the people, even Grant, who seems rather stuffy. I'm glad we got to learn about all his good points before the end of the story! There were so many wonderful insights into human nature as Annabelle deals with her daughter's questions and explores her own life. Maddie Dawson is an incredibly wise woman to have so exquisitely captured so much truth and wisdom in this novel. I loved this book, and highly recommend it.

This is a fictional novel, but the characters are so real it reads like a true story. The scenes are so emblematic of everyday life that M. Dawson provides the experience of analyzing your best friend's journal. The Stuff That Never Happened, is full of prose that has just the right elixir of drama, humor, and back-story, making it all too easy to slip away from your own life for a few hours and stay up reading long past the time when you should have been asleep.

Just so happens that one of the things that I liked the best about this story is also the thing that I liked the least about this story. Strange, I know. This is the thing: There isn't really a big plot, no real suspense, no climax, and no big surprises. By reading the back of the book you know that Annabell McKay has to choose between two men: her husband and a man from her past. In a nutshell, that is the story. It sounds like typical chicklit, and I'm typically not a big fan of that genre, but this was much better than most of the other books I've read in this category. M. Dawson definitely has a talent for making normal and flawed characters become extraordinarily interesting.

4 1/2 SOLID STARS

We just had a local carnival and I rode the Zipper. The Zipper makes you spin every which way and this is how I felt reading this book. Okay. I loved the characters and Maddie Dawson writes fluidly. I was hoping for an easy read and did not get it at all! Meaning, this story is very deep and while I get that love is about the ups and downs and survival, I would have walked away from the drama long ago. But I'm glad people aren't like me because this was a great story that I couldn't put down. And it made me question my own thoughts about what love really means. I'm going to buy this book when the price drops(I have it on my Kindle currently)so that I have it on my shelves. I also really like the cover (I saw it in the bookstore which is what made me look for it on Kindle). That way I have this book forever in case something happens to my Kindle.
How better of a recommendation do you need? I'm buying this book twice!

If you're looking for a standard-issue contemporary fiction offering about a woman, a marriage and the past, sorry to disappoint you. This may have familiar plot points, but it's five times better than most of its peers due to the strength of the characterization and the author's deployment of delicious, perfect plot surprises.

Annabelle, an almost-fifty book illustrator with a straitlaced husband, goes to New York help her pregnant daughter and face down both her her past and her present. Over and over again in this book (as in life), there are moments of upset and reversal and shock that keep your eyes on the page until you find out what happens next. It's not a perfect book, but it's a perfect read, offering up the pleasures of immersion in a life that seems very, very here-and-now, very real.

There are so many kinds of good books. Personally, I tend to love a complex, literary, grim read; this novel is not at all one of those. It's easy and charming and affectionate. We are not talking Madame Bovary. But it's not frothy. It manages to take a hard look at marriage and its expectations and to draw some surprising conclusions. Very highly recommended for a certain reader; did you like Love in Mid-Air? Then read this. You'll be delighted.

The author had me in the first two paragraphs of The Stuff That Never Happened. When Annabelle McKay, the narrator of the story, began crying in the supermarket, not sure why she was, but conjecturing it could have been because it was February in New Hampshire, I knew I was going to enjoy this story. I've spent many, many winters in New England and I know that feeling of February--that mind numbing, bone chilling, nothing to see but ice everywhere--I knew there was a reason to cry in the supermarket.

But there is so much more to this story. Annabelle has been married for many years and her children have flown the nest. Now it's just her and her husband in the house. And her husband is very involved in writing a book, so he has very little time for anything but his writing. Suddenly Annabelle is called to New York City to stay with her daughter who is pregnant and having difficulties with the pregnancy. Annabelle sees this as a time to not only help her daughter, but reflect on her marriage. I was treated to stories of the present and the past, back when Annabelle first met Grant, back in the 1970s.

I loved this story. The characters were so fully developed, I felt I knew them. I don't remember any other book that had me practically talking out loud to Annabelle, giving her unsolicited advice and chiding her for things she did say and things she didn't say. I would recommend this book to anyone who is in a long term relationship, anyone who has felt somewhat dissatisfied and wondered if it was all worth it. This is a story well told with characters that seem real, as if they were your next door neighbors.

I have not been so consumed in a novel like this is a very long time. If you're looking for a book to get lost in, this is your book. I instantly fell in love with each character and found myself rooting for and against them throughout the story. Annabelle is very relatable, from her wild past to her motherly qualities and questions about love. Grant is also so charming and easily imagined. Their two children, Sophie and Nicky are witty and sweet and add a unique depth to the plot. The story line was well developed and cohesive. Remembering the past and living in the future oddly work together to create a lifelong story of love. By the end, I found myself wishing the story would continue.
I read this book on a snow day in Connecticut and I truly found myself completely intrigued. I couldn't help but keep reading to find out the ending. I highly recommend reading this novel if your looking for something light but intriguing and heartfelt.

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Although I guess technically this would fall in the genre of chic-lit, those who are not a fan of that genre should give this book a chance as it is much less superficial than the average chic-lit about single girls in a big city.

Annabelle is a junior in college when she meets Grant McKay who is in graduate school at a party where the "nerdish" young man is a loner. And since Annabelle's date is busy flirting with another girl, Annabelle and Grant strike up a conversation. They run into each other on campus several times and when Annabelle's father tells her she will have to move home as he can't pay her rent, Grant offers his small place for the remaining five weeks in school. Although the two couldn't be more different, they fall into an easy friendship that soon becomes more. After the school year is over and Annabelle moves back home, Grant finds that he can't be without her and suddenly proposes. Knowing that he has a job waiting for him as a history professor at Columbia University and anxious to get out of California, Annabelle says yes although she regrets it only days later, wishing she could turn around and go back home. When Annabelle calls home and finds that her brother has been shot and in a coma, she ends up flying home to be at his side, leaving Grant to drive the U-Haul the remainder of the way to NYC. Grant ends up finding a place to stay at the home of his mentor, Jeremiah, his wife Carly, and their two year old twins Lindsay and Brice. With Grant spending long hours at work, Jeremiah being on sabbatical to work on a book, Carly resurrecting her dancing career after giving birth to twins, Annabelle and Jeremiah are left on their own. Soon their friendship becomes infatuation and despite their married status, evolves into more.

Told in first person and alternating between the late 1970s/early 1980s and 2005, Dawson, in her debut novel, has found the perfect way to tell Annabelle's story. We know that in 2005 Grant and Annabelle are still married, living in New Hampshire he teaching at junior college and writing a book and she a successful children's book illustrator, so what happened to her relationship with Jeremiah?

All comes to a head when, while back in NYC caring for her daughter Sophie during a difficult pregnancy (her husband is working in Brazil), she runs into Jeremiah, now a widower, at a market she used to go with him years ago. Being that her husband has been distant in demeanor as well as miles, will she be tempted to threaten her 28-year marriage?

In this, her first novel, Maddie Dawson has written a doozy of a story that should have a wide appeal. It is hoped that she has many more novels in her if THE STUFF THAT NEVER HAPPENED is any indication of her talent. I enjoyed this story immensely. Highly recommended.

I just finished this book, and I absolutely loved it! In fact, toward the end I had a lot going on and yet I still couldn't put it down until I found out what happened and how everything was resolved.

I usually stay away from books with a character who cheats on a spouse or significant other because I am very sensitive to such story lines, but I was hooked by the reviews and then, again, by the sample I downloaded to my Kindle. I am so glad I gave it a try. Dawson has a way of bringing you into her characters' lives and making you care about them. They seem so real - they make mistakes, they love, they feel deeply, they wish and yearn - just like all of us. Annabelle (the main character) was very sympathetic and engaging, and her cheating all those years ago was actually understandable, while not condoned or excused. I liked how the author took a horrible situation - the cheating - and turned it into something that really seems to have saved Annabelle and Grant's marriage and, in the long run, made their lives better. Sometimes difficulties really do work out for the best, don't they?

As for the writing style, it really grabbed me. The descriptions were lovely without being overly flowery, the dialogue was very realistic, and the writing itself was very smooth.

Maddie Dawson's novel, The Stuff that Never Happened, is aptly named. Throughout protagonist Annabelle McKay's lackluster marriage, she has never forgotten about the man she didn't get when she was young - ex-lover Jeremiah. Over the years, she continually fantasizes what life would have been like if other choices had been made. Now in middle age, she travels to care for her daughter back to the days of her courtship and marriage to husband Grant, and the scene of her affair to Jeremiah. Her past collides with her present, and she is compelled to view her life through a different lens.

Sometimes a little slow, sometimes slightly rushed (specifically the ending), the book is a tad uneven. Yet the author manages to give the reader something not found that often - a book about love and relationships for the middle-aged adult. The differences between young love and mature love, the power of the loss of a fantasy, and how difficult it is to get off a path once on it, are all themes nicely investigated in this novel. This is a solid attempt. 3 1/2 stars.