Arthur Martin

Based on a true story, Second Chances is the uplifting tale of a little girls physical and emotional reawakening after a car crash claims her father and her spirit. The accident leaves 10-year-old Sunny Matthews unable to walk without crutches. However, the damage to Sunnys leg pales in comparison to her emotional wounds, which cause her to withdraw from life and everyone around her. Miraculously, things begin to change when Sunny and her mother Kathleen move next door to a horse ranch run by one-time rodeo star Ben Taylor. Sunnys recovery begins as she develops an affinity for Ben and a love for a mean-spirited, crippled horse named Ginger.… (més)

This could have had 5 stars. And I generally liked the story. The female protagonist's husband died while deployed before she could tell him she was pregnant with their first child. The story picks up roughly two years after the husband's death and she's struggling. Struggling to make it through each day, to care about joining the living, to do anything other than take care of their child. She has well-intentioned but clueless friends who seem to need her to rejoin life for THEM to feel comfortable. She also has a fairly self-interested mother who wants her daughter to snap out of it already, find a new father for her baby and generally just not be so difficult.

Enter super hot lawn boy--who has grown up well over these past few years. You can almost hear "Stacey's Mom" in your mind as he looks at her from across the super hot lawn. :) There's a significant age difference, and, let's face it--if you actually really really loved your husband, it's going to take some significant effort to learn how to process the grief, honor his memory and move on so you can have hot monkey sex with someone else and maybe even open your heart in the process. All good stuff. The authors do a great job of letting you know what challenges both the widow and hot lawn guy have in their lives and in their psyches. You like both of them--even though they're flawed. You buy into the slow build of their relationship. Again, all good stuff--which is why I gave this three stars.

The editing sucked. I'm not just talking about double periods (although there were) or misused words (although there were), I'm talking about magically disappearing babies, magically changed days (I think) and the same old spew 75% of the way through the book. You've got these lovely evolving characters who lapse into almost verbatim verbal diarrhea 50 pages after they have already dealt with that psychosis. You've got scenes where the baby is there and then magically no longer addressed or present. There's one mind-boggling day that I think is really two or three days, but I'm not sure. And that makes me sad because the story is such a great love story. Read it if you think you'll enjoy the story line, but have a glass of wine or two so you don't notice unnecessary repetition or play the "where's waldo the baby" game.… (més)