Second Chance

by Jane Green

Step inside the home of Holly Mac and meet her successful, distinguished husband Marcus, notice how beautiful her home is and how gorgeous her children Daisy and Oliver are.You might say that they are the perfect family, but you would be very wrong...Holly is desperately lonely. She has spent her entire marriage trying to be the perfect wife but she is missing the one thing she really wants - a husband she can talk to, a soul mate to share everything with, someone like her first love and best friend Tom.Then a terrible tragedy finds Holly reunited with some old friends, and she soon realises that they too are each beset by their own problems. There's Saffron, a Hollywood actress and a recovering alcoholic, in love with a very famous and very married actor. Then there are Paul and Anna who have a great relationship but months of IVF have destroyed them financially and Anna still isn't pregnant.As the safety net of Holly's life begins to unravel, she's about to confront her problems head-on but is she ready for the change? And faced with a second chance at life, will she take it?

• ISBN10: 0670038571
• ISBN13: 9780670038572
• Publish Date: 1 July 2007 (first published 19 June 2007)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 10 May 2014
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Viking Books
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 374
• Language: English

Reviews

[Leah]

Having really disliked Jemima J – I barely got to 30 or so pages before giving up, I had a pre-conceived opinion on Second Chance and judged it before I’d even read it. However I really enjoyed Second Chance and found it a quick and absorbing read.

First off I have to mention the beautiful, shiny cover which I really love. It’s green, shiny and I really like it.

Now on to the story. The whole plot is about a group of friends reunited after twenty years after a tragedy involving one of the gang. We follow their lives and discover all is not as rosy as first seems: Holly Mac is having marriage doubts, Saffron is an actress still waiting for her big break, Olivia is still in love with her ex and Paul & Anna are trying for a baby with little success.

I found the way in which the tragedy occured slightly odd – I don’t want to mention it but it’s such a small and irrelevant part of the story that I’m not really spoiling anything. The tragedy is more the starting point to the story, and so is not the main focus of the book, and the way in which it happens is, as I said, odd. Why bring in a terrorist attack only for it to be unused and completely ignored. I think terrorism is too big a subject to plop into a chicklit novel only to be used sparingly. It could have been done a different way.

I enjoyed the main story, the old friends reuniting and felt it was well explored and written. All of the friends were completely different and had changed so much yet it still felt so comfortable for them to get back to the friendship of old.

Where Jemima J alternated between writing styles – first person, third person, etc – Second Chance was written in third-person as if the narrator was talking directly to you which I eventually got used to and enjoyed. It must be quite a difficult writing style to keep up but Jane does that well.

Of the characters I really enjoyed reading about Saffron – she was my favourite and I loved when we came to a part about her; Paul & Anna – I thought Anna was brilliantly written and Olivia – she seemed more in the background than the other characters which was a shame as I enjoyed her chapters too.

The only character I didn’t really like was Holly Mac. I found her far too indecisive and I hated the way we kept getting the “she would never cheat, never” rammed down our throat every few sentences. Especially since I didn’t believe a word of it.

I enjoyed Will’s character but the disappeared at the end, which was a shame. Marcus was irritating and seemed to get progressively worse during the novel – obviously our designated villain – however I didn’t find him that bad – a bit pompous sure but nearly not as bad as some men are written!

Overall – while this review may seem a tad negative since I didn’t particularly like the main main character, I did actually enjoy the book and loved all parts of the novel bar Holly Mac’s which I found myself skimming through particularly as I got closer to the end of the novel.

I also liked that Jane tackled some serious subjects like Paul and Anna’s difficulty having a baby. I will definitely give some of Jane’s older books a try, maybe not Jemima J, and will try her two newest ones The Beach House & Girl Friday (which is released next month)

Rating: 3/5