Second Chance (Jane Green)**

I only read this because my friend offered it to me cheap. She hadn’t been able to finish it, and there were several moments – maybe one on every page – where I wondered if I was going to give up on it too. But it did pick up a bit in the middle, and it is a lot better than the other Jane Green book I read, Straight Talking.

Second Chance begins when a group of old schoolfriends get together for the first time for years following the death of Tom, another member of their group. He died in a terrorist attack. This annoyed me a bit as a lot of people really did lose friends and family in this way and it somehow seems a bit too close to the events to start making money out of it by writing a book. I don’t mind stories set in the Second World War though, so maybe I’ll get used to terrorist stories.

They sit around the table and talk about their lives, all displaying an irritating characteristic of talking about themselves without the use of a first person subject pronoun. (“Am this. Did that. Married X.”) Just don’t hear this very often, so was surprised when this large-ish group of people who have had completely different lives all start doing it at once. Didn’t find it very realistic. Am not however accustomed to sitting round in large groups.

The characters are a lot stronger than this opening suggests. The main character, Holly, drives me mad – like most fictional Hollys, she is one of the most miserable creations in fiction. We’re all supposed to love her, but I just wanted her to shut up and go away somewhere where I didn’t have to read about her. Then there’s the allegedly sweet, gentle Olivia, who somehow has the filthiest mouth of all of them. Paul, the organiser, somehow fades into the background, but Anna and Saffron between them make the book worthwhile.

Anna is bossy Paul’s wife. She unable to get pregnant and not very happy, but manages to push this aside in order to help a group of people she hardly knows. Maybe part of the reason I find it difficult to admire Holly for this characteristic is because Anna had it in shitloads.

Saffron is an actress who has been touted as the Next Best Thing for years, but hasn’t yet made it. Saffron has done a number of stupid things in her time, and has a bad habit of saying the first thing that comes into her head, but there’s something very endearing about her: something very normal, even though her life isn’t the sort of thing most people can imagine.

But Green makes it very difficult for us to form our own opinions of her characters. All the way through, she keeps telling us what to think. She stops the narrative in order to give us some anecdote that apparently proves her point. But I don’t want her telling me all this. I prefer to be able to form my own opinions – and there are much more subtle ways for an author to make a character’s personality clear. Maybe I’m less likely to pick up on subtle things but I don’t want any author beating it into my head with a rolling pin either.

She tells us how horrible Marcus is to Holly right from the start – which left me wanting to defend the poor guy. He’s obviously a total prat but he's also very insecure. He isn’t a completely unsympathetic character although I did go off him later. I sympathised with him a lot more than Holly because Holly had the author bigging her up at every opportunity, whereas poor Marcus is constantly put down. No wonder he wants to show how good he is all the time. I wouldn’t want to marry him though!

There are good bits in this book. You could just read the Saffron bits and ignore the rest. It would be quite a good book then. But it would also be a very short book.