The Magic of Found Objects: A Novel

by Maddie Dawson

From the bestselling author of Matchmaking for Beginners comes a feel-good story about becoming who you were meant to be all along.

Phronsie Linnelle was conceived at Woodstock in a serendipitous liaison between a free-spirited hippie and a farmer’s son and was born with magical wonder flickering in her DNA and rationality knit into her bones. All her life she’s been torn between the two. But now that she’s been betrayed by both love and the mother she once idolized, her rational side is winning.

So when her best friend from childhood proposes that they give up on romance and marry each other, Phronsie agrees. Who better to spend your life with than your best friend? Maybe the connection they already have is love. Maybe there’s no falling to be done. But immediately after they announce their engagement, she encounters someone who makes a very charming and compelling argument for revisiting romance.

While her even-keeled stepmother argues for the safety that comes with her new engagement and her mother relays messages from the universe to hold out for true love, Phronsie must look to her own heart to find the answers that have been there all along.

• ISBN10: 1542021510
• ISBN13: 9781542021517
• Publish Date: 1 August 2021
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Amazon Publishing
• Imprint: Lake Union Publishing
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 366
• Language: English

Reviews

[Jeff Sexton]

Another Maddie Miracle. When I read my first Maddie Dawson book last year as an ARC, I knew I had found an author that will be able to give me a satisfying tale in a way I might not think at first is satisfying, but who can make it work and make it be truly magical. Thus, I was waiting for her 2021 release to hit my ARC channels... when suddenly it showed up out of the blue as a Kindle First Read instead. So I didn't even look at the others, I automatically picked up this book. Then when Amazon began their Kindle Summer Rewards beta program and included me in it, it turned out I needed to read an actual book - rather than my "normal" (these days) ARCs, which come into the Kindle as "personal documents" - and thus I automatically turned to this book to read.

And again, Dawson crafts a quirky, off beat tale unlike any I've ever encountered, essentially a coming-of-age tale... at damn near the time most people are beginning to have their mid-life crises. Not quite a true dual-timeline book, and with quite a bit of time elapsing "off screen" both in the remembered history of our main character and in her current life we're following, this book manages to explain where she is right now emotionally and how she got there. For those readers, like me, who often straddle the line between two worlds, Dawson does an excellent job of showing at least one version of how our lives look and the dichotomies we face, and she does it remarkably well. The finale, featuring our primary character despairingly trying to resolve both halves of herself, is something we all face at some point, and Dawson plays it with the sincerity, sweetness, and cathartic laughter that such moments tend to so desperately need. Yes, this tale is absolutely off-beat, and yes, it may arguably be better presented as women's fiction rather than romance, but it *does* serve well to highlight the real-world romantic realities of being single in your mid-30s (not that I've experienced this directly) and does quite well in showing both how jaded it can make you... and how oblivious. Very much recommended.