When life falls apart in comprehensive fashion around you, it is all too tempting, and understandably so, to throw your hands up in despair, dive beneath the doona (duvet) and not emerge for a good long while all while telling yourself life has nothing to offer anymore.
But the 25-year-old titular protagonist of The Unlikely Life of Maisie Meadows by Jenni Keer, is having none of that self-defeatist talk, throwing herself, as she always has, back into the fray of life, determined to put everything together again as best she can.
It’s something she’s done all her life since her parents split roughly a decade and a half earlier and she thinks it has served her well, allowing her to mould order out of chaos and some semblance of a locked down life out of the messy uncertainty of being alive.
It’s a can-do attitude that sees her house immaculately neat at all times, save for the one mysterious room into which she admits almost no one which doesn’t follow the over-ordered script, and propels her to quit her job at a brewing firm when she discovers her boyfriend/boss hasn’t been as faithful as the endless romantic had hoped.
She quickly lands on her feet with a new job as the marketing/social media manager at a small but up-and-coming auction house where she quickly fits in with the eclectic cast of owners and fellow employees and begins to feel at home in a way she hasn’t to date.
And, if anyone could gather the scattered Meadows, it was her [Maisie] – largely because she was the only family member everyone was still talking to.
But with two siblings abroad, parents who couldn’t be trusted alone in any room that contained sharp objects, and another sister who managed to generally rub everyone up the wrong way, it was a seemingly impossible task.
At the same time she’s reinventing herself, though once again without dealing with the base issues that push to deal with the pain of her broken family by creating order in everything around her, she discovers part of her beloved onetime neighbour’s Meredith’s tea set, which evokes a wave of nostalgia and sets her on course to reuniting the full complement of cups, saucers, plates etc which, in turn, pushes her to try to get her warring mother and father and three disparate siblings back into the one room.
It’s all sounds warmly laudable and lovely, and in some ways it is with Maisie happily seized by the idea of bring back together that which has been unceremoniously pulled apart, and while it sends the narrative off on some inventively fun and heartwarmingly quirky paths, it means that Maisie is once again ignoring what lies at the heart of these impulses.
Not that The Unlikely Life of Maisie Meadows is really the type of book to take a deep dive into the root cause of her mental health issues.
Rather while it alludes to the drivers of these narrative yearnings, it is content to let Maisie do what she will without too much introspection or real growth though she does find herself a lovely found family of sorts, which fills the perfectly together void her own family can’t, and magically, and yes there is a bit of low-level magical realism injected into proceedings, manages to unite the tea set though quite how must be left to the reading of this sweetly charming novel.
The only negative in what is otherwise a cutely lovely story with real warmth and a celebratory love and need for connection is the very thing meant to make us go “awww” with romantic longing.
For at Gildersleeves the auction house, where Maisie makes friends with lonely elderly Arthur and reticent Ella, she meets the scruffily and endearingly handsome Theo whom she makes some assumptions about, as she does about the flamboyant owner Johnny (who’s a real sweetheart) including that he’s already happily hitched.
He isn’t of course and the back and forth yearning for Theo that Maisie engages in is meant to drive a fair slab of the story; but while the tea set and the family element feel organically part of the narrative, and deliver some nice emotional payoffs, the romance with Theo doesn’t quite gel.
It feels tacked on or shoved in, not quite working as a part of the greater whole, undercut all the more by the fact that Maisie, freshly bruised and broken by her caddish ex Gareth at her previous place of employment, almost immediately sets about repeating history.
You could argue that, having not engaged in any kind of self-aware healing, that she’s bound to keep repeating unhealthy emotional patterns, and that does seem to be the case in part, but it also feels like a disservice to an otherwise kind, sweet, well-meaning character who, in this one instance, is revealed time and again to be an absolute romantic idiot.
Theo’s eyes flicked briefly up from the forkful of noodles making their way mouth-ward. ‘It’s fine, there aren’t any no dating policies at Gildersleeve’s’
‘Well, there should be,’ she [Maisie] said firmly. ‘It’s all very well while everything in the garden is rosy, but when it all foes bottoms up, the fallout is immense. Believe me – I speak from experience.’
‘Right, well that’s me told then …’ Theo mumbled to himself.
And then she blushed as she realise he was possibly already one half of a staff couple.
But perhaps that is the point?
None of us learn all too well from our mistakes, well not as fast as we need to to avoid repeating them, and Maisie may just be the poster girl for flawed humanity and how it takes a lot sometimes for the lesson to really be learned.
That does seem to be the case by the happy-ever-after end of The Unlikely Life of Maisie Meadows which largely deliver the kind of warm-and-fuzzy feels you want from a book like this, but you feel a little robbed for Maisie that she seems patently unable to recognise and allow for this great gaping hole in a life that is otherwise got so much love and promise.
All in all, The Unlikely Life of Maisie Meadows is a highly readable delight (bar some clunky dialogue here and there) which takes us into the world of a mostly relatably flawed person who simply wants love, connection and family and who works hard to make that happen.
It doesn’t, of course, come together quite as she envisages but in a lot of ways that’s a good things because it underscores how life often defies our expectations for the better, taking somewhere we never expected to be but which just what we did, now and well into a cosily connected future.