A review by opalmars
Second Chance Books by Carina Gaskell

lighthearted

• Plot- or character-driven? Character

2.5

(beware: LONG review 💀) – I hate to be the person that gives a pretty unknown self-published book a low rating, but alas… I just did not enjoy this. 🙁 On paper, this book has everything I should love, but unfortunately the execution just didn’t work for me.


ESTRANGED CHILDHOOD FRIENDS:

Nell and Tom were friends for a couple of months as children. Now, 7 years later, they meet again and pick things up as if they weren’t estranged for almost a decade. I’m sorry. I don’t care how close you were as kids; you are basically *STRANGERS* at this point! Even if they’d been best friends for a decade in the past (which they weren’t! They literally only knew each other for a pretty short period of time), it’d still be weird to act as if no time had passed. But Nell and Tom immediately started acting as if they were still super close:

➤ Clamping their hands over each other’s mouths to shut the other up (Nell literally did this on their 1st conversation, like???? That is so strange??? Also, she says her skin “burned” where it touched his lips, because of course it did… 🙄)
➤ Tom immediately gives his phone and password to Nell and trusts her to text the girl he likes (mind you, they met 5 MINUTES prior!!!! There’s no way in hell you’re trusting this person with your phone like that! 😭🤚🏻)
➤ Nell gets *JEALOUS* that there’s a girl in Tom’s life… Mind you, she started talking to him just minutes earlier, and before that they were friends as kids for only a couple of months and never spoke to each other again for almost a decade… Jealousy in this instance is INSANE, I’m sorry 🥴.

It was just so JARRING to see these 2 people act as if they hadn’t been estranged for nearly a decade! And the author just didn’t do a good job developing their friendship throughout the rest of the book. She just assumed that, if they were friends as kids for a couple of months, we didn’t need to see them reconnect. Relying on their past friendship to carry to present day just didn’t work at all.



PRACTICE DATES:

The moment they meet, Nell decides to help Tom get the girl he likes (Paulina). I don’t know why this happens. Nell likes romance books, sure, but it is never established that she’s particularly good at setting people up or carrying conversations. She literally says “I’m just not good (…) with people. (…) If I’m any good with either of you, that’s by chance, not out of an inherent skill or social savvy.”………… 😑😑😑 It was honestly annoying how the book kept trying to convince me their little arrangement made sense, and how Tom kept reiterating that he trusts Nell’s judgment and expertise, when it’s literally established she has NONE.

So… Yeah. There is no reason for Nell to help Tom with his love life, but they decide she’s the perfect person for the job. Sure. If you say so, I guess… 😐👍🏻 As for Tom’s side of the deal, he’s supposed to… tell Nell… how he feels about Paulina… to help Nell write a book for her university project… or something???? It’s honestly just ridiculous, and even the characters have trouble making it sound serious: “I help you prepare for your dates with Paulina, you share your... boyish insights on romance.” 🥴🥴🥴 Yeah, alright girl. 🤣 She literally forgets about this project and barely ever mentions it throughout the book, which I’m honestly not mad about, because this sounds kinda dumb.

Moving on to their “love lessons”. The first thing Nell does is take Tom’s phone to text Paulina it was nice to see her, and Tom literally says Nell is “really good at this”… 😐 They then have a “practice conversation” where all they do is say “How are you?” / “Good and you?” and ask what the other person is doing for work, and then Nell tells Tom: “You see how it’s just a back-and-forth, right? Like ping-pong.”… 😐😐 When Nell tells him to ask Paulina to meet up, he says “I would have never thought to do what you told me to.”… 😐😐😐❓❓❓❓❓❓❓

I’m sorry, but is Tom a child? Is he a robot? An alien? I understand being socially awkward and anxious (I am, too!), but come on… This man literally needed help to have the most *basic* conversations ever, and then acted as if Nell had just done something otherworldly by telling him to ask his crush “How are you? How’s work?”… 🙄 During their first “love lessons”, Tom was written as if he was an alien learning how to talk to humans for the first time. It was weird.

Their other love lessons were never show on page! 🤪🤪🤪 I like the idea of practice dates, but these were literally just telling instead of showing — we just breezed through MULTIPLE of their “love lessons” without actually seeing them. We were told in a couple of paragraphs that they did a LOT of activities together (watch a bunch of movies, analyze romcoms, share playlists, study notes about kdramas and Ghibli movies, etc.), but we never saw them, which SUCKS because 1) it’d be fun to see, and 2) it would help develop their romance, which definitely needed development…



ROMANCE:

This is supposed to be a friends-to-lovers story, but the author 100% relied on their past friendship (which only lasted a handful of months, almost a decade ago, and was BARELY even shown on page). In the present, they’re basically strangers, and yet the author doesn’t waste much time rebuilding their friendship, and instead chooses to jump straight into the romance, which means their romance has no foundations.

The moment they meet Nell is immediately feeling warm, thinking “God, he’s so hot when he talks philosophically at me” (cringe, btw), wondering what it’d be like to kiss him... Tom is quick to start tucking her hair behind her ear, petting her head, thinking he’d do anything to keep her smiling… All of this in the 1st 4 days after they meet, by the way. 🙄

There was literally no basis for their romance, other than the fact that Nell had a crush on him when they were kids (which, btw, is kind of pathetic, because they only knew each other for just a couple of months, and it’s been 7 years since she last heard from him… What the fuck do you mean your feelings didn’t falter after almost A DECADE? 🥴🥴🥴). At some point Nell literally admits her love for him is just based on her past crush: “A love which I’m certain is just my twelve-year-old self being nostalgic.”, and yet the author didn’t think of… idk… DEVELOPING IT IN THE *PRESENT*????????? 🙄

Anyways. This thing draaaaaaaaags for absolutely NO reason. Everyone around them keeps insisting they should date, and acting shocked when they learn they’re not together, and it just got repetitive and boring. 🥱

Nell’s reason to drag this romance was the following: she kept insisting she could never ever EVER be happy, because both her mum and her sister had problems in their love lives. I understand having little hope when it comes to your love life (girl, SAME), but pleeeease. Nell’s self-pitying monologues became repetitive, and self-sabotaging herself at the end for no reason other than “mum and sis had bad love lives, so I guess I need to have a bad love life too! 🤪” was just STUPID. Just stop being dramatic and go…

Tom’s reasons to drag the romance were a bit more… slimy. At the start of the book he wants to date Paulina, and Nell helps him. He quickly realizes he doesn’t like Paulina, and likes Nell, but, for some reason, he doesn’t break it off with Paulina???? It was honestly kinda horrible how he kept stringing poor Paulina along, knowing damn well he liked someone else. And the book still painted him as a great guy??? Hmmmm idk about that…



CHARACTERS:

Nell was a little annoying. Her self-pitying antics about how she couldn’t have a happily ever after just because some people in her family also didn’t have one made me roll my eyes, at a certain point. 🥱 Her constantly comparing herself to Paulina was also very infuriating. Yes, she acknowledged that her envy of Paulina was bad and not very #feminist of her (which I appreciate!), but it didn’t make her statements and comparisons to Paulina any less *2012 INLOG*, if you know what I mean. 😬

Nell’s POV was also bogged down by long monologues that were completely unnecessary to the story and sometimes disrupted scenes or conversations. Even though I agreed with what she was saying, I really didn’t need a Feminism 101 aside about why romance as a genre should be respected, and how people invalidate things women enjoy, and how boys are praised for sleeping around while girls are shamed, and how girls are expected to be physically attractive, but can’t be aware of it, otherwise they’re arrogant, etc etc etc. These interruptions just felt clunky.

Tom was… strange. At first, as I already mentioned, he was written as incapable and unaware of how speak to other human beings. He then became slimy for stringing Paulina along while knowing full well he liked Nell. 😬 Overall, however, Tom was just written as a Perfet Book Boyfriend™. Think of any cute line you’ve ever read in a fanfiction or romance book, and Tom has said something similar:

➤ “I’m struck by this inexplicable feeling—like I want to squish her cheeks and go to war for her at the same time.”… Perfet Book Boyfriend™.
➤ “Someone out there will see you and he’ll become the luckiest guy on Earth.”… Perfet Book Boyfriend™.
➤ He unnecessarily drives 2 hours every day to take her home after work when she could just take the bus… Perfet Book Boyfriend™.
➤ “She’s the last thing I think of when I go to bed, and the first when I wake up in the morning.”… Perfet Book Boyfriend™.
➤ He is always noticing little things about Nell (something Nell conveniently thought was a trait of a great romantic partner) and he’s “overcome by fondness for her” just by looking at her … Perfet Book Boyfriend™.
➤ “I love when you talk books to me.”… Perfet Book Boyfriend™.
➤ “She’s the last thing I think of when I go to bed, and the first when I wake up in the morning.”… Perfet Book Boyfriend™.
➤ “Her smile lights up her face; I’m seized by a desire to do anything to keep it there.”; “Every time she laughs it’s like the sun turns up a little brighter, and all I can think about is wanting to kiss her, to taste her laughter, sweet like honey in my mouth.”… Perfet Book Boyfriend™.

There are SO MANY of these! And I’m not saying they’re bad! I’m just saying that, since Tom and Nell’s romance wasn’t very well developed, these felt unwarranted. Also, there were soooo many of these lines that this genuinely started feeling like a parody. 🥴 Like, “let’s just pick some generic popular swoon-worthy lines that will look good on a tiktok”! I just couldn’t take them seriously anymore. 🥴



PLOT:

The main plot line (other than Tom and Nell’s “love lessons” that we never really get to see) is about them making a documentary for the book club at the bookstore they work at. This felt a little stale because they’d interview someone, the interviewed would say something #deep about how much the book club means to them, and Nell would feel guilty she’s secretly working to close the bookstore. Rinse and repeat. Thankfully, they only interviewed a handful of people.

Nell’s job at the real estate agency felt kind of ridiculous, and I didn’t care about it. Her job at the bookstore was also bizarre, because the owner literally insisted that this random ass girl needed to work there, agreed to give her a lot of money just because, and literally decided to let her inherit half of his stuff when he dies…???? He’s known this girl for like, 2 weeks… be for real 😭.

The 3rd act conflict is something you could see since the 7% mark of the book, so it was anticlimactic (and also made the romance drag for even LONGER, which was infuriating).

The ending was sweet and lowkey made me kind of emotional for this bookstore I didn’t care at all about for the entire book lol, so there’s that.