Second Chance by Jane Green (#5, Chick Lit)

For the month of February, our book club voted to read Jane Green's Second Chance. We were searching for something on the lighter side of things, something that would allow us to recover from our heavy first read, Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns.

Now if you have been reading booknymphs for a while, you know how I feel about chick lit. I always begin these books with such great hope--I always want them to be good, I want them to be satisfying and funny and romantic and overall, a great story. But as we know, good chick lit is hard to find. Aside from reading Jane Austen--who can be credited with the creation of the chick lit genre--it's pretty rare to find a piece of modern chick lit that I actually enjoyed and would recommend to a friend. That said, I started Second Chance with low expectations. I didn't really think it would be that good and I worried how the book club discussion of it would go.

I was right about the quality of the book. It was chinsy and downright annoying at times when the narrative style fell into typical chick lit whiney whiney female babble. That is my number one pet peeve when reading these girly books. I cannot stand a whiney main character waxing about how no man will ever love her or what if he likes me or I don't like him or I really do like him or what am I saying, there is no way he will ever like me etc. You get the picture. It reads too much like a personal diary for me and if I wanted to read something like that I'd read my own journals from high school.

I was wrong about the quality of our book club discussion. I thought the six of us would have a hard time finding things in this book to talk about but apparently our abilities to relate to the themes of Second Chance made for a long, interesting discussion. The subject matter (the death of a close friend bringing the group closer together) really sparked an intense discussion as we all could better relate to the characters. Compared to our stilted and mostly quiet discussion of A Thousand Splendid Suns, Second Chance inspired a vibrant conversation that had us all sharing stories and laughing uncontrollably. And the funniest thing is that only two people actually finished the book! Sadly, I must admit I had fifty pages to go when we met to discuss but I finished it afterward, I promise!

Our pick for March is Bernhard Schlink's The Reader. Sarah is hosting and it will be interesting to see how our discussion of another heavy themed book will go.