Second Chance

by Jane Green


I feel that Jane Green lost the inventiveness in her fiction quite a while back. I became a fan of her work when I read Jemima J. But so far, from her impressively-sized backlist, I've really only enjoyed The Other Woman.

Second Chance had an interesting premise: the death of Tom in a terrorist attack compels the rest of the gang (Holly, Olivia, Saffron & Paul) take a long hard look at their lives and wonder whether they're making the most of their time. However, I feel like JG didn't spin out anyone's storyline very well except for Holly (had a thing with Tom in their youth, now married to a very stuffy, pretentious divorce lawyer). The others' stories felt like filler. (Paul & his wife struggle with infertility, Olivia has been burned by a long-term relationship that ended badly, Saffron is an actress involved with a very successful, married Hollywood star.)

Plus the resolution just annoyed the heck out of me.

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OK, clearly I don't care too much about upsetting you if you get to this paragraph (you really shouldn't allocate time to this book, if time is a valuable commodity over where you are). But Holly ends up leaving her husband after spending the first 95% of the book bemoaning how little time he spends with them, how pretentious and stuck-up he is, how he belittles her; after comparing him unfavorably with both Tom and his brother Will (who she develops a crush on!). What killed me though was that she basically bitched about all these issues, only to suddenly realize toward the end that she was also to blame since didn't try to help him or talk to him enough and fought him instead of trying to find a solution to their problems.

Huh???

I mean she acted and talked like a victim the whole time. She never gave the impression that she tried to fight and tried to assert herself more, in that first 95% of the book.

Reading this book brought me to one conclusion: no one writes ChickLit like this gal.