Second Chance Summer by Morgan Matson
I believe that Morgan Matson is one of my favorite authors, in fact, I was so excited for her new book Save the Date, which came out this year and hopefully I will get to post its review ASAP. This is the last book that I needed to read to complete my collection of her books before Save the Date. I have reviewed all of her other titles and I absolutely love them and fangirl every time that one of her other characters are mentioned in one of the novels, like in this one, although I will address that later.
What I absolutely love about Morgan Matson is that she is always able to balance family relationships, friendship, romance and personal reflection for the main character perfectly, which creates the most enjoyable novels and stories with unforgettable characters and this time, it wasn´t different.
Second Chance Summer narrated the story of Taylor, a teenager from Connecticut, who lives with her mother, father and her two siblings, Warren and Gelsey. It has been years since she has visited Lake Phoenix, in fact, the family hasn´t gone for such a long time that they have rented their home until now.
Taylor´s family decides it is important to spend time with each other after they realize that her father is ill and he asks for another summer at Lake Phoenix, where they were once the happiest. But when the family arrives at their home, Taylor starts to get memories of the life she left behind her. For instance, she remembers how she fell in love with Henry and how close she was with Lucy, her best friend, but she also remembers how bad everything ended and how coward she was.
Once the Edwards family gets settled in their home at Lake Phoenix, Taylor suddenly realizes that too many things have changed. For once, Henry is now her next door neighbor and they will have to meet even when they don´t want to. On the other hand, when Taylor finally gets a job at the beach snack bar, she realizes that Lucy, her former best friend, works there too, which puts them in an awkward situation since they will have to eventually talk to each other.
Now, Taylor has to make the most of her summer with her father while accepting her mistakes and moving on from them and cherishing her memories with friends and family.
I want to start this review by mentioning that I have always spoken about how much I love Matson, in fact, I even mentioned it at the beginning of this review, but I would like to say that this is probably my least favorite novel from her, not because I didn´t like the characters or the way the story was balanced, in fact, I absolutely loved those points about this story, but what I didn´t really like was how after finishing the novel, I was craving more for character and story development, including Henry´s character and story. I liked how some stories had an ending and how the story actually showed development, especially in the relationships. I absolutely loved how each relationship in the story evolved as the pages passed by, I specifically loved Taylor and Lucy, Taylor and her father and Warren and Wendy. But after ending the story, I didn´t feel satisfied with the story as I was with her past novels. I believe that maybe I had too many expectations for the author since I have read more of her newer novels and just like every other author, she probably evolved and learned how to communicate her stories better.
Now, going back to the relationships in the story, I absolutely adored how natural they were. I liked how Matson was able to craft a story where the characters weren´t forced to be in a certain place to meet, the characters were actually crafted to interact with each other and move from there. For example, Lucy and Taylor work together, which makes them notice each other and realize that there are many things that could change between them. The relationships were my favorite thing in this novel.
On the other hand, I liked the characters. I enjoyed Henry, although not as much as I enjoyed other Matson´s male characters, like Roger, Clark, and Frank. I just wanted more from him. Besides, he smells like bread and frosting, I want a boyfriend that smells like a cupcake too! As mentioned before , what the story was lacking in my point of view was progression for each story, it just seemed like we only saw how the characters were guided to the beginning of very large paths, like their relationships, and I didn´t really like that.
But I did enjoy reading about the Edwards family because they just seemed very normal and each of the members were different and brought something new to the story. Also, it was interesting to read the story from a character that didn´t consider herself special at all within her family because it definitely brought a new point of view.
In addition, I just want to mention the dog because it was so cute and refreshing to read about.
Something that I really liked was the way that the summer was portrayed because everyone created their summer lives in a small bubble where they knew that there was nothing outside of that since they were all holding onto something that was so precious that was going to be taken from them, but never returned, which was their father. I think that story itself was very emotional because the presence of her father always brought a certain bittersweetness to the stories, but it actually led to the beginning of so many things. Yet, at the same time, I didn´t like how these gave the freedom to the characters to do whatever they wanted because it created so many stories that at some point, the reader had so many things to focus on when there were really important things happening in another side of the novel. In addition, I felt like at the end of the novel, I didn´t really know Taylor because there was nothing that was said about her other side of life in Connecticut, which I think would have helped us understand our narrator better.
However, I really liked the writing because Matson gave us the perfect combination of past and present in their Lake Phoenix bubble, which helped us understand what really happened and how the characters developed in order to get to that point.
Lastly, I really liked the character development from Taylor because she grew up in the short time that we got to know her, she realized what she was lacking and she changed it. This was something that I really liked about the main character.
Overall, Second Chance Summer by Morgan Matson is a refreshing summer romance novel, where you will be able to immerse yourself in a story surrender by the beach with childhood friends while shedding a couple of tears while understanding that the line that separated a human being from life and death is very, very thin.
