The Unexpected Everything

By Morgan Matson

Andie has a plan and she alwayssticks to the plan.
Future? A top tier medical school.
Dad? Avoid as much as possible (which isn't that hard considering he's a Congressman and never around).
Friends? Palmer, Bri, and Toby - pretty much the most awesome people on the planet, who needs anyone else?
Relationships? No one's worth more than three weeks.
So it's no surprise she's got her summer all planned out too.
Until a political scandal cancels her summer pre-med internship, and lands both her and Dad back in the same house for the first time in years. Suddenly she's doing things that aren't Andie at all - working as a dog walker, doing an epic scavenger hunt with her dadand maybe, just maybe, letting the super cute Clark in closer than expected. Palmer, Bri and Toby tell her to embrace all the chaos, but here's the thing ... can she?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Release date: May 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781471146152

Morgan Matson

Morgan Matson is the New York Times bestselling author of six books for teens, including Since You’ve Been Gone and Save the Date, and the middle grade novel The Firefly Summer. She lives in Los Angeles but spends part of every summer in the Pocono Mountains. Visit her at MorganMatson.com.

Reviews for The Unexpected Everything

[simplykelina · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am not a huge fan of Morgan Matson, but so many people have this book in their top reads of last year. I actually tried picking this up several times, and I could not get past the first chapter. I was finally in the mood to give it another try.Based on Andie’s family, it was not realistic to think she would become a dog walker. Her father (regardless if there was a scandal going on or not) would have used his connections to help her get into the camp or find her a summer job. I started to make a little more sense when you find out she never even told her dad what happened right away.I was surprised when Andie and Clark did not have a great first date. It was refreshing! Everything you read always has insta-love, so I liked that the romance was not perfect right away.I did not like how Andie treated her father in the beginning. I did enjoy seeing them come together and begin healing from the loss of Andie’s mother. There were some emotional moments which hit me a little harder since I lost my father at a young age.Overall, I was surprised with this. I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would.

[emeliz21 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A great summer read! I'm in love with Clark and also all the dogs. I will say that Andie's friends got on my nerves, and that it took me a while to get into, but once I did, I really enjoyed it

[Mukvipa S. · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have a good time reading this book,
even when the things got intense and I had roll my eyes several time for Andie's decision though,
I have enjoyed it and Clark was such a sweet sweet guy. don't to mention all the adorable dogs

[Sadia · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

a bit cliched, but loved it.light and refreshing, perfect ending.

[readingbeader · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Andie's summer plans come to an abrupt end after her Congressman father's office is investigated for misappropriation of funds. Her medical internship position gets cancelled, so she gets the only job left available this late in the season: walking dogs, about which she know nothing. Even though it seems that everything is going wrong, she realizes that it might turn out okay--all her friends are home this summer, she and her dad are reconnecting, and she meets a guy who just might make it past the three week mark.

I read this book in a hurry.., because I like Morgan Matson's books. They often have witty dialogue and characters I can care about. As I was looking on Goodreads I read the blurb for her next book and caught a reference to it in the one, fun.

[fredamans · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Pulled in right from the start!Andie is my kind of girl. She is smart, and knows what she wants. It's finding creative ways to get there that makes it interesting. She is a high profile persons' daughter and getting out of view of the limelight is often tough. Those moments make it great in the story right from the start. You really get a sense of her life.I also appreciate the friendships she has. A girl with her life would really need a few really close friends she can trust.The relationship with Clark is the sweetest though. As I read the ending, I really felt like this story could be turned into a movie because of the wonderful character dynamics.I love Matson's writing. It is easy and makes you feel good. You can often connect with it somehow too. She is definitely one of my favorite young adult writers, that's for sure!

[bookworm12_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It’s the summer before Andie’s senior year of college when her plans change at the last minute, leaving her open to take a gig as a dog walker. I love the relationship with her friends, though one of the characters was annoying. The plot line with her politician father was probably my favorite part. The book is fun, but definitely much longer than it needs to be. “A comfortable silence fell between us-like this was just the beginning. Like we’d have a lot more time to talk about this.”“I knew, right away, that this wasn’t a story he’d told a lot-or ever. There was no easy cadence here, or practiced gloss.”

[sjgirl-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Disappointing. I very much enjoyed the three other books I’ve read from this author, this one felt as though its length was incompatible with the way the story was told, resulting in seriously slow pacing and a level of emotional depth not on par with what Morgan Matson achieved with her other releases. A financial scandal forces Andie and her politician father to stay home for the summer. Fortunately for Andie, she has plenty of ways to escape the awkward silences with her dad (the pair haven’t been close since her mom died five years earlier), there’s her super tight friend group to rely on, dogs to walk on her new job, and a new guy who just might tempt her into the first long term romance of her life. While I liked Clark well enough, and he and Andie shared a nice chemistry, I much preferred Andie’s interactions with her dad, for me, their scenes, whether having nothing to say to one another, hitting their limits with one another, or bonding, the father/daughter relationship was the standout part of the book, unfortunately there wasn’t enough of it. I just kind of feel like when you have the luxury of over five hundred pages in which to tell a story, the heroine’s most emotional arc (essentially the loss of both parents when her mom passed away) could probably be explored to a much greater degree and not be resolved quite so easily.I do love that as usual with a Morgan Matson book, friendship plays a big role here, but at the same time, I think that’s where the pacing most suffered. The story is told entirely from Andie’s POV, and Andie is more than a little self-absorbed (that’s not a criticism, everybody’s guilty of that from time to time, I’m good with flaws), it’s just that what should have and could have been engaging friendship stories of betrayal, of dependence and independence, weren’t as involving as they might have been because we’re only seeing them through Andie’s eyes, and since she was to consumed with her own stuff to truly pay attention to what was going on with her friends, there was less insight into certain sections of the book than I would have preferred. Telling the story of four friends from only one friend’s viewpoint ended up feeling quite limiting. The whole time I was reading this one, I kept thinking, certain scenes might have had more depth had they been told from someone other than Andie’s POV, like what if we were in Palmer’s head while she was under pressure working at rehearsals, would those scenes have felt as throwaway as they ultimately did? What if we spent some time with Toby while she unrequitedly crushed, wouldn’t the moment she’d been crushed have been a lot more palpable than seeing it through the eyes of someone who had been dismissive of her romantic nature? What if we’d been with Bri when she had that life altering decision to make, would she have come off as callously as she did here, or would it have been much more complex? I can’t help wondering if each scene had been told from the point of view of the character impacted the most in that moment, would the pacing, and the length of this book have felt like such a slog?The characters and plot had plenty of potential, it just stayed a little too close to the surface rather than going as deep as the number of pages might have allowed.

[cathishaw · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

wasn’t sure what to think about this book at first. While the characters were great: believable, quirky and adorable; the plot line wasn’t exactly engaging. For the better part of the book, the reader is just following Andie around on her aimless summer, hanging out with her friends and walking dogs with her while she tries to figure out her feelings for Clark. In short nothing was happening.But then I realized that was the point. Matson was setting up the story so that the reader could really connect with Andie and her friends and feel almost as if you were one of the group. And they are a pretty amazing group of people. By the time she stumbles upon a secret Bri is keeping that threatens to destroy the tight knit group of friends and jeopardizes her relationship with Clark, as a reader you are so invested in the story that you can’t believe what is happening.In the end, I really enjoyed this book. It wasn’t one I raced through but one that slowly grew on me and hooked me in the long run.

[nbmars · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This young adult book takes place in the summer before Andie Walker’s senior year in high school in Stanwich, Connecticut. Andie, who is 17, and her three BFFs, Palmer, Bri, and Toby, hang out together constantly. In fact, Bri and Toby are inseparable. Palmer’s boyfriend Tom is also part of the group. As the story begins, the other three girls besides Palmer are looking for summer romances. Andie's relationships usually last only around three weeks, and she is fine with that.Andie’s dating pattern gets a change, though, when, while doing her summer job walking dogs, she meets Clark, a handsome shy guy with a big dog named Bertie. Although Clark is tongue-tied in her presence and at first says nary a word, she gets a crush on him. In a humorous aside, their incipient relationship is almost derailed when Andie confesses she doesn’t read books:“‘I know how to read,’ I said, seeing the alarm in this expression, ‘I just don’t love fiction. You know, novels.”“Wait,” Clark says, “What do you do on planes?”This is actually more than funny to Clark, because it turns out he writes books - he is the young author (19 now) of a series of vastly popular fantasy novels, and sections of this book are preceded with excerpts from his books that mirror what will be happening in the story.The relationship with Andie and Clark has some other roadblocks to overcome. One reason Andie’s previous relationships have been so short-term is that she, the daughter of a career politician, holds back and doesn’t like to reveal much about herself. Opening up to another person is dangerous:“It went against everything I’d been told my whole life - sometimes explicitly, but more often not. . . . Stay on message. Don’t tell people what you really think or feel - unless it’s been vetted and approved. Keep people at arm’s length and your feelings to yourself.”Plus, she lost her mother five years earlier to cancer, and she is afraid to get too close to anyone.Other themes include the changing nature of friendships, Andie’s relationship with her father, and dealing with loss.The story unwinds pretty much predictably, with an ending that ties together the rest of the book in a paean to fantasy sagas.Evaluation: Generally, Matson is a good writer who creates engaging stories and characters. This one, I thought, was a little long, and could have undergone some downsizing without sacrificing the appeal of the story. The characters were also not drawn as convincingly as usual for this author, and I wasn't sold on the chemistry between Andie and Clark. Nevertheless, it’s a fun book, and has lots of appealing and clever aspects to it.

[edgoldberg · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Yes, I know. I should have posted this a few months ago. Better late than never???Andie Walker’s summer isn’t going as planned. Her summer program at Johns Hopkins fell through. Her Congressman father is under investigation. In the five years since her mother died, Andie’s been left in her Connecticut home in the care of sitters while the Congressman is in Washington. Now he’s home, thinking he can be the father he hasn’t been in five years. However, there is an awkwardness in the air. They have nothing to say to each other and now she’s got a curfew.The bad news is that the only summer job Andie could get was walking dogs. The good news is that this is the first summer in several years that her ‘group of four: Andie, Palmer, Bri and Toby’, will all be home for the summer.The bad news is that before she even started her job she got slobbered over by a runaway dog. The good news is that particular dog walker was kind of cute.Morgan Matson, author of Amy & Roger’s Epic Detour, Since You’ve Been Gone and Second Chance Summer, is a master of the summer time romance. As you know, I rank her up there with the established Sarah Dessen and newcomer Emery Lord (by the way, her new book When We Collided should be on your reading list).When you pick up The Unexpected Everything you know there will be romance and the inevitable breakup, there will be unrest among the group of four, there will be father-child consternation. But isn’t that what you expect in a ‘beach read’, which this clearly is (and I mean no disrespect by it). I will admit that it took me about 50 pages to start getting into the book, but once I did, I didn’t want to put it down.The cover of The Unexpected Everything utilizes the ice cream theme found on Since You’ve Been Gone. With the addition of a gaggle of dogs (is that what a bunch of dogs is called?), the cover makes the book totally inviting. Ice cream and dogs. Made for summer.So, if you haven’t read Morgan Matson, you should start. If you have read her books, this is a welcome addition to her library.