The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
A match made in Guilford
Local author’s 10th book a summer bestseller
With her 10th book, Sandi Kahn Shelton of Guilford has a summer smash on her hands, earning a place on the Washington Post bestseller list soon after its May release. A few days ago it was the No. 1 bestseller in single women fiction and in literary humor on amazon.com.
“Matchmaking for Beginners: A Novel” is the fourth book for the former New Haven Register columnist under the pen name Maddie Dawson, and has sold more than 50,000 copies, with 1,800 reviews on Amazon.
The plot? It’s about a woman named Marnie who is jilted at the altar and then talks the guy into marriage anyway, thinking it’s just a panic attack. They quickly break up (on the honeymoon) and, before long, she finds out she has inherited a brownstone in Brooklyn that belonged to the great aunt of the ex-husband.
That great aunt, named Blix, is very alive when the novel begins. Asked about the novel’s quick acceptance, Shelton said in a phone chat that “it has a little bit of magic to it. Blix is kind of witchy and is a matchmaker and when she meets Marnie, she thinks, ‘Oh, this is the person who can finish up my projects for me,’ because Blix knows that she’s gonna die. And Marnie ... has a little matchmaking to her also.”
The action moves from California to Florida to Brooklyn — three places Shelton knows well from childhood and now frequent visits to her daughter’s family in Brooklyn.
When Marnie gets to Brooklyn, she finds “a completely different life than the one she imagined,” Shelton said.
With the romance and magic, the book is being hailed as a great summer book, but it’s no Hallmark movie.
“It really is a summer read,” Shelton agrees, “(but) it can be read at different levels. It’s just a little light romance but also people have been saying it’s given them hope about finding love in their lives because Blix has a mantra that ‘Whatever happens, love that.’
“It was a message that I was worried might be too sappy, but it’s resonating with people,” said Shelton/ Dawson. “And I think there’s so much bad news going on all the time that maybe it’s the kind of book that just can allow people to escape a bit and know that something horrible isn’t going to happen in this book.”
The genesis of the book was in November 2016 when a friend said, “Why don’t you have a series and have it be about one character who goes around and does different things?” Shelton said. “And I thought ‘maybe she could be a matchmaker.’ ... It wasn’t that simple when I sat down to do it, but it was still kind of more fun to be thinking about that stuff (than American politics). I mean, everybody wants love in their lives, so it’s such a nice thing to figure out how to write about that without sounding, you know, stupid.”
The book isn’t fluffy at all, notes Shelton, since “lots of stuff doesn’t work out the right way and she (Marnie) ends up with a guy that nobody thought she would end up with . ... These are really flawed people who are trying to control everything about their lives and realizing that they can’t control anything. That’s really what the message of the book is.”
“People have been saying it’s given them hope about finding love in their lives.”
Sandi Kahn Shelton, aka Maddie Dawson