3 New Books About Second Chances
Ilana Lucas
Ilana Lucas
Ilana is an English professor, theatre consultant and playwright based in Toronto, Canada. When she’s not at the theatre or insisting that literary criticism can be fun, she’s singing a cappella or Mozart, occasionally harmonizing with the symphony, or playing “Under Pressure” with her rock handbell group, Pavlov’s Dogs.
They say you only get one chance to make a first impression, but most of our favorite stories are about second chances; we love reading about the recovery after the fall, the Comeback Kid, that brand-new phase in a seemingly ordinary person’s life. The books in this week’s book club all begin in the second act of their main characters’ lives, when something big changes. Read on and discover a second-chance career, a second chance at life, and a second chance at love.
<em>The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.</em>
“I do attest that I am here against my will, having been brought here from September 8, 1850, and from the city of San Francisco, California (the day before California was granted statehood). I do attest that I belong in Boston, Massachusetts in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. There, and then, I am part of the Department of Diachronic Operations: a black-budget arm of the United States government that has gone rather badly off the rails due to internal treachery.” In Stephenson and Galland’s collaborative effort, Melisande Stokes starts off as a lowly lecturer in the Ancient and Classical Linguistics Department at Harvard, a seemingly prestigious job that actually involves a lot of grunt work and no job security. Imagine her surprise when she (literally) runs into a man who asks her, seemingly at random, to translate a selection of antique documents for a shadowy government agency that even the craziest of conspiracy theorists haven’t discovered. At a much, much higher salary than she currently makes.<em>The Little French Bistro</em>
Sometimes the life we’ve got seems too difficult to bear. For Marianne Messman, it’s not just being stuck in a rut; she’s been married for 41 years to her emotionally abusive and controlling husband Lothar, she feels unable to make decisions for herself or be happy, and she’s had it. When she takes a package trip from Germany to France, she decides that her last act will be to drown herself in the Seine: “Her final today. Time had seemed infinite when she still had many years and decades ahead of her. A book waiting to be written: as a girl, that was how she had seen her future life. Now she was sixty, and the pages were blank. Infinity had passed like one long continuous day.”<em>Our Tiny Useless Hearts</em>
Janice has a pretty safe life. Her work as a microbiologist is stimulating and stable, and she’s mostly alright on her own after her divorce. Her family, however, has other plans for her seemingly placid existence: Her sister Caroline has been married to Henry for 15 years and has definitely moved out of “Newlywed Lane.” The cracks are more than beginning to show, as Henry compares marriage to having to eat the same food for every meal without a break and starts having a serious affair with his children’s elementary school teacher. When he leaves, Caroline follows, and that leaves Janice to stay at their house and take care of the children, Mercedes and Paris, trying to give them some semblance of normalcy while everything changes. Or so she hopes.Ilana Lucas
Ilana is an English professor, theatre consultant and playwright based in Toronto, Canada. When she’s not at the theatre or insisting that literary criticism can be fun, she’s singing a cappella or Mozart, occasionally harmonizing with the symphony, or playing “Under Pressure” with her rock handbell group, Pavlov’s Dogs.
Ilana Lucas
Ilana Lucas
Ilana is an English professor, theatre consultant and playwright based in Toronto, Canada. When she’s not at the theatre or insisting that literary criticism can be fun, she’s singing a cappella or Mozart, occasionally harmonizing with the symphony, or playing “Under Pressure” with her rock handbell group, Pavlov’s Dogs.