Drawing on her own family's summers spent on Cape Cod during her youth, author Christina Clancy's debut novel The Second Home tells the story of the Gordon family and what happens one fateful summer during their Cape Cod trip that ends up changing the dynamic of their family forever.
Every year during their months-long break from their jobs as teachers in their hometown of Wisconsin, Ed and Connie Gordon like to take their two teenage daughters Ann and Poppy to spend the summer at their beloved vacation home on Cape Cod — a house that has been in the family for generations. The summer of 2000 marks the second year that the Gordons are accompanied to Cape Cod by Michael, the teenager they adopted after his mother's death the previous year. At first, the trip starts off like it does every summer, with the family enjoying all the fun and leisure that a vacation on the Cape has to offer. Not long into their stay, Ann — the 'always serious, never without a plan' older daughter — lines up a babysitting job with The Shaws, a wealthy family also spending their summer on the Cape. Meanwhile, Poppy — the free-spirited younger daughter — spends most of her time at the beach, where she hangs out with a group of surfers she just met. And Michael, still unable to believe how incredibly lucky he is to be accepted and loved so whole-heartedly by the Gordons, is perfectly content spending time with Ed and Connie in the Cape Cod house that he has come to love. Unfortunately, the family's usually happy summer soon takes a turn for the worse when Ann becomes involved in a situation that not only upends her life and drives a rift into her relationship with both Poppy and Michael, it also destroys the underlying fabric of their family forever.
This is one of those books that left me feeling conflicted after I finished reading it. While there was so much I liked about the book — the engaging story, the descriptive writing, the atmospheric and beautifully depicted setting, the themes I resonated with — the main thing that prevented me from loving this one were the characters. Of course, I hated the character of Anthony Shaw like pretty much anyone reading this story would — it's to be expected given his loathsome actions, plus he is the obvious "villain" in the story. What I didn't expect was that I would dislike Ann — the main protagonist— as much as I ended up doing. As a character, Ann frustrated me to no end. Yes, her self-absorbed, pretentious, arrogant personality was annoying, but what frustrated me the most was her continued haughtiness and pettiness even after she got herself into the predicament that upended her own life and the lives of others — it made my blood boil the way she would be jealous of her siblings and begrudge them for living their lives on their own terms rather than staying behind to help her clean up the mess she made of her own life. Some may argue that she was young and naive, which ok, perhaps makes her behavior excusable at 17 years old, but how about 16 years later when she is in her thirties and still behaving the same way? It made it really hard for me to feel even an ounce of sympathy for her despite what she went through (and I'm pretty sure I'm probably the only who feels this way, which is fine).
Despite my strong reaction and the obvious frustration I had with some of the characters, I liked everything else about this book well enough overall for me to still recommend it as a worthy read. In fact, this one ended up being quite a page-turner for me, a story I was so absorbed in that, if I didn't have to get up early for work, I very well could've finished in one sitting.
Received e-ARC from NetGalley and paper ARC directly from publisher St. Martin's Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment