The Bookshop of Second Chances by Jackie Fraser
Brilliant Captivating Entertaining
Genres: Contemporary Fiction/Romance
The Bookshop of Second Chances by Jackie Fraser 
When Thea Mottram’s husband mistakenly sends his wife a text message laying out before her, his blatant indiscretion in all its pictorial glory, she rather foolishly takes the decision to leave her marital abode, making way for her now ex-friend and her brood of three to make themselves comfortable in her home of twenty years . To make matters worse, she is also now unemployed. Having set herself up in a flat and purchased a couch on which she’d laid wallowing in self-pity for days, she is persuaded by her best friend Xanthe to collect more of her possessions that she is reluctant to leave in the hands of Chris and his ready-made family. Whilst there, she collects a letter addressed solely to herself from a firm of Solicitors. At a rather opportune time, fate has handed her a distraction by way of an inheritance from her Great Uncle Andrew & at the bequest of the correspondence, she heads to Scotland to meet with her Uncle’s Solicitor and check out the rather fancifully titled ‘West Lodge’. Could Uncle Andrew have inadvertently given her, not only the keys to his home, but to a whole new start?
I picked this book to read as in my experience, novels with ‘bookshop’ in the title are always a good find. This is a brilliantly expressed navigation through the difficult time for a woman whose life has fallen apart at the hands of her treacherous spouse. It is fantastically eloquent and very descriptive, you’d almost think the Author was writing about her own experience. To my knowledge she isn’t. Her lead character
Thea is an incredibly strong and resilient woman, who to my mind is far too amicable and polite to her cheating husband and handles the whole thing in a very adult, calm fashion. The name she adopts for both parties involved in this dreadful act of deception was the first thing to really give me a flavour of the personality of the Author and tone of the book and assured me that I’d chosen something that would be a pleasure to immerse myself in.
The way in which Thea manages to unwittingly embroil herself in the lives of the small town’s ‘Aristocracy’, all two of them, I use the term loosely, provides the more comical turns with Charles living at his ancestoral home not far from West Lodge, and Edward in the town, above his second hand bookshop, both seething with resentment for each other, sparked by a trivial prank initiated by Charles to prove who was more successful with the fairer sex in their teenage years and antagonised by Edward’s attempts to gain the upper hand in the intervening years. 
Much like Thea, I had my suspicions about Charles’ motives from the start given that he undoubtedly wants West Lodge once again under his family’s ownership and the chance to get revenge on his brother. I’m not even convinced that rescuing her after her altercation with his sibling was entirely chivalrous and selfless. Thea’s friendship with Edward however had an ease and warmth to it that made it exhilarating to read. The only element that I struggled with slightly was Edward’s very rapid upward turn of demeanour from a stuffy, grumpy and unsociable business owner, known to all the town for his unlikeable ways, to relaxed and jovial. His actions however, after he sees Thea talking to another man in the pub, and after a little indiscretion of their own, feeling defensive and looking for ways to protect his ego and deeply buried and damaged heart, made me fear that he had returned to his former curmudgeonly manner. When Thea and Edward’s association has the chance of becoming something more, they reminded me of a film couple who I later in the book realised were Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman in Truly, Madly, Deeply. Edward, with his brooding, sarcastic but laid back quick wit and Thea with her equally quick wit, but tendency to be more cautious and more uptight, an over-thinker. 
If you are offended by the use of swearing or blasphemous terms in your reading material, it’s probably best to sit this one out. The dialogue that the Author chooses for her characters is very ‘real’, very ‘down to earth’, and whilst I found this refreshing, many people perhaps wouldn’t. The ‘F’ and ‘C’ bombs explode frequently, but I found this to add to the character’s personalities and the narrative’s light heartedness and humour. 
I will be following this Author and continuing anything else she has written.
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