Scan barcode
beccakatz's review
5.0
I love the witty dialogue of this book! Literally had me laughing out loud. I love Maggie, Deb, and the Matheson family. I can’t wait for the rest of this series!
raidingbookshelves's review
emotional
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
relaxing
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
I started reading this series…at least ten years ago. Jen Allen was publishing her writing on fictionpress.org and was one of a group of writers who were plagiarised. They banded together, dumped fictionpress and created a secure livejournal community where they polished off and republished their stories.
Plagiarism Haven closed its doors in 2015 but I followed Jen to her personal live journal where she further refined her stories. I’ve continued to follow her creatively through Facebook and Instagram – jumping at any chance to read the latest version of her stories and be reunited with my old friends. Then, during the chaos of COVID-19, Jen self-published the Chasing Mathesons books through Amazon. Rejoice – now I can pick up the Mathesons anytime I’ve feeling down and delight in their quirky and heart-warming antics.
Ok, my love note to Jen – who I’ve never met in person but have claimed a friend via the internet – is over. On to the review.
Visions of You is the first in the romantic comedy trilogy featuring the Matheson family finding love. Our weird and wonderful protagonist, Maggie Leonard, has the perfect man – cute, funny, good looking and absolutely smitten with her – there’s only one problem…he only exists in her dreams.
That is…until David Matheson walks into her coffee shop and Maggie’s dreams come true…literally.
Visions of You has fun, fast and quirky dialogue – Maggie, David and her best friend Deb, have the kind of high-speed quippy conversations that fans of Gilmore Girls will die for. They’re weird, which makes them cool, (somewhat) self-assured and stumbling their way through life in a hilariously upbeat way.
Maggie is the fast talking, wonderfully awkward, imperfect girl we all want to be. She’s the more realistic manic pixie girl – fast talking, uncoordinated, flawed and fiercely loyal. She has suffered through a tragic childhood and come up singing (literally!) and watching her find love feels like watching Fate hand her a golden ticket.
The road to happiness is not without its challenges – Maggie and Dave have an enormous hurdle to cross in order to find their happily ever after. But as every vision of her perfect man is fulfilled by David, Maggie finds herself head over heels and deeply in love.
Content warning: domestic violence, abuse, hospitalisation
What I like: Let’s be real? I like this entire story. I made fan art for this series. Don’t judge me – I’m an OG fan.
What I didn’t like: I got nothing. It’s hard to pick apart something that I’ve watched grow for so long. Not only does this story make me nostalgic, but I’ve seen Jen nurture it from idea to physical printed book.
Conclusion: Please read this book and dive into the entire series. I love this book so much and I don’t think it is even my favourite book in the series. This book is the pick me up you didn’t know you needed. It’s a shoulder bump from a friend, or a snuggle from a pet. It gives me the warm and fuzzies.
Plagiarism Haven closed its doors in 2015 but I followed Jen to her personal live journal where she further refined her stories. I’ve continued to follow her creatively through Facebook and Instagram – jumping at any chance to read the latest version of her stories and be reunited with my old friends. Then, during the chaos of COVID-19, Jen self-published the Chasing Mathesons books through Amazon. Rejoice – now I can pick up the Mathesons anytime I’ve feeling down and delight in their quirky and heart-warming antics.
Ok, my love note to Jen – who I’ve never met in person but have claimed a friend via the internet – is over. On to the review.
Visions of You is the first in the romantic comedy trilogy featuring the Matheson family finding love. Our weird and wonderful protagonist, Maggie Leonard, has the perfect man – cute, funny, good looking and absolutely smitten with her – there’s only one problem…he only exists in her dreams.
That is…until David Matheson walks into her coffee shop and Maggie’s dreams come true…literally.
Visions of You has fun, fast and quirky dialogue – Maggie, David and her best friend Deb, have the kind of high-speed quippy conversations that fans of Gilmore Girls will die for. They’re weird, which makes them cool, (somewhat) self-assured and stumbling their way through life in a hilariously upbeat way.
Maggie is the fast talking, wonderfully awkward, imperfect girl we all want to be. She’s the more realistic manic pixie girl – fast talking, uncoordinated, flawed and fiercely loyal. She has suffered through a tragic childhood and come up singing (literally!) and watching her find love feels like watching Fate hand her a golden ticket.
The road to happiness is not without its challenges – Maggie and Dave have an enormous hurdle to cross in order to find their happily ever after. But as every vision of her perfect man is fulfilled by David, Maggie finds herself head over heels and deeply in love.
Content warning: domestic violence, abuse, hospitalisation
What I like: Let’s be real? I like this entire story. I made fan art for this series. Don’t judge me – I’m an OG fan.
What I didn’t like: I got nothing. It’s hard to pick apart something that I’ve watched grow for so long. Not only does this story make me nostalgic, but I’ve seen Jen nurture it from idea to physical printed book.
Conclusion: Please read this book and dive into the entire series. I love this book so much and I don’t think it is even my favourite book in the series. This book is the pick me up you didn’t know you needed. It’s a shoulder bump from a friend, or a snuggle from a pet. It gives me the warm and fuzzies.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Violence and Death of parent
mariereads_books's review
2.0
This review was originally posted on Marie Reads Books.
Maggie Leonard is in love. David is perfect: kind, considerate, not afraid to show emotion, and he’s handsome to boot! The problem? David only exists in Maggie’s dreams – literally. Every night, she dreams different scenes that involve her and David and their perfect love story. You can imagine her shock when, one day, David walks into the coffee shop she works at. And then the dreams start coming true.
I’ve been a fan of Allen’s work since she was posting stories on FictionPress.com over a decade ago and the Chasing Mathesons series, of which Visions of You is the first, has stayed with me since I first read it. The characters are particularly memorable and I have a lot of genuine affection for them, so when I discovered that Allen has started self-publishing her work through Amazon, I snatched up a physical set of the Chasing Mathesons series immediately.
Before I say anything about the book itself, I just want to comment on the cover (and the covers of all the books in the series). They’re all designed and illustrated by Allen herself, who is a graphic designer and artist when she’s not writing books. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a set of covers that so perfectly match the vibe and feel of the stories they hold. They’re cute, quirky and bold, which is exactly what the Chasing Mathesons series is.
The concept of the series is a strong one that I’ve always liked: Fate literally steps in to help people find their soulmates. The ways that Fate chooses to interact with various people throughout the series is really original and adds a lot of humour. In Visions of You, Maggie has dreams sent by Fate that foretell bits of her relationship with David Matheson, even before she’s met him. For a hopeless romantic like Maggie, the dreams are the perfect medium. Other characters throughout the series experience Fate in different ways that suit their personalities, and watching each character cope with Fate is half the fun.
The characters in Visions of You, but also the series as a whole, are particularly strong. Like I said, they’ve stayed with me for over ten years and I’ve thought about them reasonably often in that time. Allen has a great grasp of the voice of each character. In Visions of You, Maggie’s friend Deb is a stand-out – instantly identifiable in both voice and behaviour. If I were to criticise anything about the characters it’s that sometimes Maggie feels a bit too much – I found her a bit over the top at certain points, almost cartoonish, and David is too perfect. He has no flaws, not even that he can’t say no to people and so overcommits and burns himself out. He’s literally the perfect guy. In real life, he’d probably be a great person to date but in a novel, nothing about him added tension or conflict. He was just there being nice and I found him a bit dull.
I also struggled to figure out what Maggie’s character journey was. To me, she felt very much the same at the end of the book as she did at the beginning. I could see small hints of how she might have changed by the end, but I felt these changes were very abrupt and hadn’t been built up effectively over the course of the novel. The fact that her big conflict at the end comes from using miscommunication also doesn’t endear her to me. For me, if a conflict between characters can be solved by those characters just talking to each other, you need a stronger conflict. I’m not saying Maggie should have told David about the dreams, because I can understand why she wouldn’t do that, but there were things she could have told him that would have saved a lot of unnecessary drama and both strengthened and challenged their relationship in other ways.
I think the hardest part for me about this book was its lack of an editor. The story is good now, but with the help of a professional editor, it could have been really great. A lot of the macro issues I had with it would have been picked up by an editor, and they could have helped work through them. The book needs polish but it’s not bad, especially for a self-published novel, and if you’re looking for a funny, light-hearted romance with memorable characters, you shouldn’t go past the Chasing Mathesons series.
Maggie Leonard is in love. David is perfect: kind, considerate, not afraid to show emotion, and he’s handsome to boot! The problem? David only exists in Maggie’s dreams – literally. Every night, she dreams different scenes that involve her and David and their perfect love story. You can imagine her shock when, one day, David walks into the coffee shop she works at. And then the dreams start coming true.
I’ve been a fan of Allen’s work since she was posting stories on FictionPress.com over a decade ago and the Chasing Mathesons series, of which Visions of You is the first, has stayed with me since I first read it. The characters are particularly memorable and I have a lot of genuine affection for them, so when I discovered that Allen has started self-publishing her work through Amazon, I snatched up a physical set of the Chasing Mathesons series immediately.
Before I say anything about the book itself, I just want to comment on the cover (and the covers of all the books in the series). They’re all designed and illustrated by Allen herself, who is a graphic designer and artist when she’s not writing books. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a set of covers that so perfectly match the vibe and feel of the stories they hold. They’re cute, quirky and bold, which is exactly what the Chasing Mathesons series is.
The concept of the series is a strong one that I’ve always liked: Fate literally steps in to help people find their soulmates. The ways that Fate chooses to interact with various people throughout the series is really original and adds a lot of humour. In Visions of You, Maggie has dreams sent by Fate that foretell bits of her relationship with David Matheson, even before she’s met him. For a hopeless romantic like Maggie, the dreams are the perfect medium. Other characters throughout the series experience Fate in different ways that suit their personalities, and watching each character cope with Fate is half the fun.
The characters in Visions of You, but also the series as a whole, are particularly strong. Like I said, they’ve stayed with me for over ten years and I’ve thought about them reasonably often in that time. Allen has a great grasp of the voice of each character. In Visions of You, Maggie’s friend Deb is a stand-out – instantly identifiable in both voice and behaviour. If I were to criticise anything about the characters it’s that sometimes Maggie feels a bit too much – I found her a bit over the top at certain points, almost cartoonish, and David is too perfect. He has no flaws, not even that he can’t say no to people and so overcommits and burns himself out. He’s literally the perfect guy. In real life, he’d probably be a great person to date but in a novel, nothing about him added tension or conflict. He was just there being nice and I found him a bit dull.
I also struggled to figure out what Maggie’s character journey was. To me, she felt very much the same at the end of the book as she did at the beginning. I could see small hints of how she might have changed by the end, but I felt these changes were very abrupt and hadn’t been built up effectively over the course of the novel. The fact that her big conflict at the end comes from using miscommunication also doesn’t endear her to me. For me, if a conflict between characters can be solved by those characters just talking to each other, you need a stronger conflict. I’m not saying Maggie should have told David about the dreams, because I can understand why she wouldn’t do that, but there were things she could have told him that would have saved a lot of unnecessary drama and both strengthened and challenged their relationship in other ways.
I think the hardest part for me about this book was its lack of an editor. The story is good now, but with the help of a professional editor, it could have been really great. A lot of the macro issues I had with it would have been picked up by an editor, and they could have helped work through them. The book needs polish but it’s not bad, especially for a self-published novel, and if you’re looking for a funny, light-hearted romance with memorable characters, you shouldn’t go past the Chasing Mathesons series.
More...