The Second Home
A Novel
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4.0 • 60 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"A novel of family and place and belonging." —Rebecca Makkai, Pulitzer Prize finalist
"Tender and suspenseful." —Chloe Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author
Some places never leave you...
After a disastrous summer spent at her family’s home on Cape Cod when she is seventeen, Ann Gordon is very happy to never visit Wellfleet again. If only she’d stayed in Wisconsin, she might never have met Anthony Shaw, and she would have held onto the future she’d so carefully planned for herself. Instead, Ann ends up harboring a devastating secret that strains her relationship with her parents, sends her sister Poppy to every corner of the world chasing waves (and her next fling), and leaves her adopted brother Michael estranged from the family.
Now, fifteen years later, her parents have died, and Ann and Poppy are left to decide the fate of the beach house that’s been in the Gordon family for generations. For Ann, the once-beloved house is forever tainted with bad memories. And while Poppy loves the old saltbox on Drummer Cove, owning a house means settling, and she’s not sure she’s ready to stay in one place.
Just when the sisters decide to sell, Michael re-enters their lives with a legitimate claim to a third of the estate. He wants the house. But more than that, he wants to set the record straight about what happened that long-ago summer that changed all of their lives forever. As the siblings reunite after years apart, their old secrets and lies, longings and losses, are pulled to the surface. Is the house the one thing that can still bring them together––or will it tear them apart, once and for all?
Told through the shifting perspectives of Ann, Poppy, and Michael, this assured and affecting debut captures the ache of nostalgia for summers past and the powerful draw of the places we return to again and again. It is about second homes, second families, and second chances. Tender and compassionate, incisive and heartbreaking, The Second Home is the story of a family you'll quickly fall in love with, and won't soon forget.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Clancy's florid, beach-ready debut, an inheritance dispute kicks up long-buried memories and secrets for a pair of sisters and their estranged adopted brother. Ann Gordon is in her mid-30s and dealing with the painful process of selling her family's summerhouse in Wellfleet, Mass., after her parents' death in a car accident. Unable to find a will, she tells what she assumes is a harmless lie, that besides her and her younger sister, Poppy, there are no other heirs to the title. Clancy then jumps back to when 17-year-old Ann arrives in Wellfleet for a summer, accompanied by Ann's classmate and new addition to the Gordon family, Michael Davis, who has been adopted by the Gordons after losing his parents. Ann gets a job babysitting for the Shaw boys, their neighbors, and becomes entangled with the boys' overbearing mother and their father, who has a wandering eye. By summer's end, a rape and a miscarriage of justice set in motion a chain of events that will change the course of Ann and Michael's lives. While the Shaw characters can be disappointingly flat in a way that borders on cartoonish, Clancy's affectionate descriptions of Wellfleet are transporting. This is sure to be a favorite with book clubs.
Customer Reviews
Beautiful story about love and family
Two siblings and two educator parents in Milwaukee bring a teenage boy into their home, eventually adopting him. Ann and Poppy love Michael and are thrilled to have him be a member of their family, until one disastrous trip to the family’s second home in Cape Cod. Michael, Poppy and Ann will live the next 15 years of their lives estranged, until a family catastrophe brings them all back together in that second home.
I loved the concept of this book at first sight. What would it take for a “perfect” family to bring another child, no less a teenager, into their home? How would two teenage girls react to a new member of the family, especially a boy? How would this teenage boy assimilate and feel comfortable being a member of a firmly established group?
Christina Clancy does an amazing job of weaving these five people into one coherent family group. Even though Ann and Michael are the same age, and Poppy is younger, no one feels left out of the family unit. Ed and Connie, the parents, do everything they can to keep the family together and functioning normally. Until that summer in Cape Cod when the family splinters irreparably. Or is it? Because of Clancy’s ability to write this story in three voices, we see each sibling’s side of the story and how their lives were changed.
Honestly, this was absolutely a “can’t put it down” type of book. I wanted to find out how the pieces would or wouldn’t come back together. Excellent book.
4.75 stars