The author of SOMETHING MISSING returns with another hilarious and sneakily profound tale about a man whose behavior is truly odd, but also oddly relatable.
Milo Slade, a thirty-three year old home healthcare aide, is witnessing the rapid dissolution of his three-year marriage to a polished, high-powered attorney named Christine. Though Milo doesn’t quite know the root of his marital problems, he inevitably blames himself, or more specifically, he faults the demands his obsessive compulsive personality place upon him–the need to open a jar of Smuckers grape jelly or sing 99 Luftballons in front of an audience, to name just a couple.
Yet Christine is still none the wiser about these inexplicable quirks as Milo has painstakingly hidden them from her and everyone else for years. No one knows the true–and in his mind more insidious–Milo, and such is the root of his profound loneliness, especially now that he and Christine are living apart during a trial separation.
Then one day Milo stumbles across a video camera and tapes, left behind in a park. He watches the first tape, which is a heartfelt confessional by a young woman who begins to reveal her secrets, starting small at first, and finally revealing that she blames herself for a tragic death of a friend. But not all the details add up and Milo is struck with the urge to free the sweet confessor from her guilt. He is, after all, an expert in keeping secrets…
In typical screwball fashion, Milo sets out on a cross-country journey to crack the case, but quickly gets sidetracked as his un-ignorable demands call. But it is during these sidetracks that the true meaning of his adventure takes shape. Milo is weird, but as he discovers, so is everyone else. UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO is a humorous and touching novel about finding oneself, embracing the journey, and, unexpectedly, love.
Author
Matthew Dicks
Matthew Dicks grew up in the small town of Blackstone, Massachusetts. He was a Boy Scout, a pole-vaulter, a bassoonist, and a proud member of his school’s drum corps, and has the distinction of having died and been revived twice by the age of eighteen. He graduated from Manchester Community College, Trinity College with an English degree, and Saint Joseph’s College with a teaching degree. Following graduation, Matthew went to work as an elementary school teacher and has been teaching ever since. In 2005 he was named West Hartford’s Teacher of the Year. His writing has appeared in the Hartford Courant, the Christian Science Monitor, Educational Leadership, and the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service. Matthew lives in Newington, Connecticut, with his wife and their daughter.
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