Book Review

The Bookshop of Second Chances by Jackie Fraser

The Bookshop of Second Chances is of the “my life just imploded but I inherited something in a far away place so I can GTFO” genre. Thea Mottram’s husband cheated on her with a close friend, and Thea found out because he accidentally sexted her instead of his mistress. Thea then loses her job, but finds out (as she’s packing up her things to move out of her home and her marriage) that a distant great-uncle in Scotland left her his very old house filled with a breathtaking collection of rare books, so off she goes to Baldochrie.

Thea bails on the remnants of her life since it seems her money problems are solved: the book collection is worth several hundred thousand pounds according to Edward Maltravers, the rare bookseller in Baldochrie. His brother, the local lord, is also trying to buy back the properties that used to be part of the family estate, and he very much wants to take the property off Thea’s hands. So she could sell both and peace out even MORE dramatically, but that’s not what happens.

Here are a few things you need to know:

This book is written in first person, present tense. This was initially irritating to me, but because there is a lot of dialogue, and not an equitable amount of dialogue tags, once characters start talking, the tense disappeared a bit.

The story is very easy to dip in and out of, and it didn’t ask much of me in terms of mental or emotional energy: Thea tells me what happens. And then what happens next. As a narrator, Thea is very smart, sometimes very funny, and pretty low bullshit in her dealings with other people. She often thinks in really lovely turns of phrase, such as this moment when she’s looking back at the remains of her marriage:

I’ve more or less stopped running over it all in my mind, wondering where I could have applied the tape. The answer is nowhere.

Please note that while I like the writing, I want to point out that Thea arrives at this perspective rather quickly, and on her own, with no talking to individuals professional or personal. It’s lovely to imagine but also sets up a bizarre falsehood about what the fallout of such life upheaval is like, and what it does, and how hard it is to deal with. I don’t demand angst out of every book I read (far from it) but I also expected some emotional resonance, some indication that this shit is hard to deal with. But mostly, everything in this story – emotions, especially – is muted and superficial.

There’s a romance, but it’s very low stakes. Everything in this book is the lowest of stakes, and the one source of tension was baffling. The main conflict is, “Will Thea stay or will she sell and go home?” Except that conflict is dissolved pretty quickly as Thea, allegedly still pondering what to do next, gets a job at the rare bookshop with Edward, even though he’s got deplorable sexist policies about hiring women (that I’d like to believe are illegal). She starts to sell pieces of her great-uncle’s collection so she has funds, though the sales themselves are never detailed. It’s like the money and the house are mentioned in passing so I know where she lives and that she’s secure, but there’s no reality into which the financial details are anchored.

The technicalities are as hand-wavy as the emotions. The thing that is most odd about “Implosion GTFO” books for me is that often, the emotional fallout of the event which caused the implosion is dealt with minimally or not at all. Sometimes it’s grief or sometimes it’s infidelity. In this case, it’s the latter, but instead of dealing with any of it, Thea just checks out and all the processing happens in the background. She disappears from her old life and the people who hurt her, and so she doesn’t really have to face any of her problems. It’s emotionally strange, and equally hand-wavy.

There are a very few scenes wherein she’s crying or processing what happened because something has happened that Thea can’t ignore, but for the most part, all those emotions about the devastation of her life are set aside as needed so the plot can happen. And I know that when you shove feelings aside, to quote many therapists online, they go in the other room to do pushups, then come back later. I expected that Thea would eventually have to process what happened to her more directly, but again, it’s minimal. I think the lowest part for Thea is at the beginning, and then her emotional recovery is a straight line upward to happier times, with a blip in the middle that serves as a pivot for her other relationships. Every piece of necessary closure is easily accomplished.

Speaking of, I mentioned that the main conflict is baffling. It’s not even a conflict, per se, but wow is it weird. Edward and his brother have a really, really bad history, and as the details emerged, I kept wondering who the hell he thought he was, and whether he was remotely worthy of Thea. He has done some really manipulative things to the people around him, and I was not convinced by the end that his behavioral history had been suitably addressed, nor that he’d break the habit of several decades of superficial dealings with people because of his declared feelings for Thea.

Other characters serve as devices and plot momentum points, not that the plot has much velocity. Thea has friends, including Xanthe, who takes nearly two weeks away from her own job and family to help Thea move to Scotland “temporarily,” but Xanthe, like the other friends and acquaintances, drops into the background after the first chapters, reappearing only to provide a plot point or two.

Most of the surrounding people in the story aside from Thea and possibly Edward and his brother (I finished this book last night and I’ve already forgotten the brother’s name) aren’t really characters in their own right. They’re more like bumpers that the slow-moving pinball that is Thea bounces off of at the right time. They exist in service to Thea’s story.  I suppose that’s realistic for someone narrating their own story after Life Implosion: they’re going to be deep into their own navel, and not notice people around them much. But in this case, the lack of vividness for anyone other than Thea added to the bizarre weightless feeling of the book overall.

The aspect that kept me reading, aside from how little the novel asked of my emotions, was Thea, who is an excellent narrator. I liked her perspective and how easy it was to pick up where I left off, and I very much enjoyed the parts where she recognizes and calls people out on their silliness.  Overall, though, the story, the characters, and the interpersonal connections within were very light, extremely superficial, and felt in the end like fluffy, fragile confectionary: pretty to imagine and easily consumed, but not very satisfying.

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The Bookshop of Second Chances by Jackie Fraser

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  1. chacha1 says:

    Interesting review! I see ‘bookshop’ in the title and I go Ooh! And so much of that setup is catnippy. But it sounds like the execution was really disappointing. I don’t require tons of angst but I do want a traumatic event to be dealt with in a realistic way. Thea sounds like a very unreliable narrator who’s telling the Instagram version of her life instead of the ‘I haven’t left this cold-ass mansion in Scotland for six days straight, haven’t washed my hair since I left the US, am hate-texting my ex at random intervals, and want to set every fancy piece of shit in this library on fire just because I can, but instead I’m going to go and rage-fuck the cute guy at the bookshop’ version.

  2. Mikey says:

    “This book is written in first person, present tense. This was initially irritating to me, but because there is a lot of dialogue, and not an equitable amount of dialogue tags, once characters start talking, the tense disappeared a bit.”

    Did the tense and person choice affect the scoring? Because if it did, that seems a bit unfair. It’s one thing if it’s somehow handled poorly, but otherwise, the choice of narration shouldn’t be a demerit in itself.

  3. SB Sarah says:

    Nah, the hero, his choices, and the pervasive superficiality of the plot were the reasons for the score. I mention the tense because it was initially distracting, and because I know some readers really, really dislike it.

  4. Lisa F says:

    I feel like I’ve read a million pieces of women’s fiction featuring this sort of plot – usually involving a bookshop, sometimes a library, sometime a bakery.

  5. Kris Bock says:

    I like the premise of “I inherited a cool home/shop in a beautiful small town /foreign country,” but I don’t really want to read the life implosion first, or witness the processing. I’d rather start later, when the character is on her way to a better mental place, so she and I get to enjoy the new digs.

    Or one of my favorites is by Barbara Michaels (can’t remember the name offhand) where the young American woman inherits a house from a distant relative she never knew, decides to take a little vacation before she sells it, and of course falls in love with the place, and with a guy, and has a dramatic adventure with a near-death climax

  6. chacha1 says:

    @ Kris Bock, some of those Barbara Michaels Gothics hold up pretty well! I had to go look at the AMZ page to see if I could guess which one that might be. Possibly Wait For What Will Come: “The last of an ancient Cornish clan, Carla Tregellas has inherited her historic ancestral home: a massive mansion looming high up on the jagged cliffs of Cornwall. From the moment Carla takes possession of the grand manor she feels right at home, warmly welcomed by everyone—except the strange and secretive housekeeper, Mrs. Pendennis, who warns the new owner of the tragic, inevitable fate that will surely befall her if she does not depart at once. But Carla cannot leave, for the unseen bonds of a dark family curse are beginning to tighten . . . and a demon lover waits.”

    Too curious now, have to get it. 🙂 This site is bad for my budget.

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