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sumomcgrath 's review for:
The Second Home
by Christina Clancy
I received an Advance Reader’s Edition of The Second Home by Christina Clancy from the publisher (St. Martin’s Press) in exchange for an honest review. The Second Home is scheduled for release June 2, 2020.
The Second Home focuses on Ann, a woman who is returning to her family’s second home on the Cape to prepare it to sell in the wake of her parents’ sudden deaths. While Ann is working to make the house ready, she is surrounded by memories of her time there. Memories of her parents and her siblings, Poppy and Michael. Once Ann is in the house, we are taken back in time with her to the last summer the three siblings spent together in the house as teenagers. Once we have learned important details of their past, we return to present day, experiencing the issues they are still working through as adults.
I often find that novels that shift between the past and present feel too sprawly for me, that they maybe include too much, and begin to feel like a day-to-day history of how characters arrived where they are now. I did not feel that with this novel. Clancy does a great job of giving us only the pieces of the past that we need to be able to move through the current day story. While the bulk of the past is laid out for us in the first half of the novel, other pieces are woven into the second half as shorter flashbacks. This helped with the balance of the story, bringing things forward in memory only when the characters (and the reader) needed them.
Clancy tells the story from the view of all three characters, alternating the point of view from chapter to chapter. This works very well for this story, where we have three characters who were very close, but have since been separated. We get to see both how they view each other (based on memory) and who the characters really are (through their own chapters). This gives us a lot of insight into the individual siblings and their complicated relationships with each other. It also allows different characters to share different pieces of the story with the reader, putting us in a place where we can see everything, while the characters are suffering through their personal lack of information.
The setting of this story is very well done. Having read the acknowledgments, this makes sense, as Clancy seems to have based the setting on her personal experience of the Cape and the old family homes found there. Throughout the novel, characters interact with the setting as if it is another character, which makes it feel very real for the reader.
Overall, The Second Home was a wonderful debut novel. While I wouldn’t quite call it a beach read, it did definitely take me to a beachy setting for a well-written family drama.
The Second Home focuses on Ann, a woman who is returning to her family’s second home on the Cape to prepare it to sell in the wake of her parents’ sudden deaths. While Ann is working to make the house ready, she is surrounded by memories of her time there. Memories of her parents and her siblings, Poppy and Michael. Once Ann is in the house, we are taken back in time with her to the last summer the three siblings spent together in the house as teenagers. Once we have learned important details of their past, we return to present day, experiencing the issues they are still working through as adults.
I often find that novels that shift between the past and present feel too sprawly for me, that they maybe include too much, and begin to feel like a day-to-day history of how characters arrived where they are now. I did not feel that with this novel. Clancy does a great job of giving us only the pieces of the past that we need to be able to move through the current day story. While the bulk of the past is laid out for us in the first half of the novel, other pieces are woven into the second half as shorter flashbacks. This helped with the balance of the story, bringing things forward in memory only when the characters (and the reader) needed them.
Clancy tells the story from the view of all three characters, alternating the point of view from chapter to chapter. This works very well for this story, where we have three characters who were very close, but have since been separated. We get to see both how they view each other (based on memory) and who the characters really are (through their own chapters). This gives us a lot of insight into the individual siblings and their complicated relationships with each other. It also allows different characters to share different pieces of the story with the reader, putting us in a place where we can see everything, while the characters are suffering through their personal lack of information.
The setting of this story is very well done. Having read the acknowledgments, this makes sense, as Clancy seems to have based the setting on her personal experience of the Cape and the old family homes found there. Throughout the novel, characters interact with the setting as if it is another character, which makes it feel very real for the reader.
Overall, The Second Home was a wonderful debut novel. While I wouldn’t quite call it a beach read, it did definitely take me to a beachy setting for a well-written family drama.