Astrid Hawk

A viscerally violent story of confronting prejudices, past regrets and bad decisions, and building good relationships in a world where it seems like violence is the only answer. The writing is vivid, raw, and penetrating. It's not an easy story to read, but it's very well done. Adam Lezarre-White was a fantastic narrator and really brought the characters to life, complete with their histories evident in their voices.

Read for First Reads June 2026. Like another reviewer, I happened to read this right after reading Remarkably Bright Creatures - and unfortunately, this book has some obvious parallels but does not compare favorably. (For one thing, it's missing a grumpy octopus to make things right :) ).

Like Remarkably Bright Creatures, The Museum of Second Chances also features a slightly reclusive/anti-social older woman with no living family, living in a small town, working alone in a museum (in this case it's more of an antiques/secondhand shop that happens to display old things rather than sell them; in RBC it's an aquarium). Unlike the other reader, I did not pick this book from the June selections *because* of its similarities to RBC, but the similarities became obvious in the first couple chapters.

Our main character Evelyn is younger than RBC's Tova by about a decade (she's in her mid-60s), but she acts like she's in her 30s, or sometimes even younger. She is very anti-social and feels uncomfortable interacting with people in town, pre-judging them all and going out of her way to avoid interactions with them even when they're going out of their way to be nice. It was hard to empathize with Evelyn, even though I am an introvert and don't relish social interactions, because her outlook was incredibly naive. She didn't avoid interacting with people in town because they had previously shown themselves to be bad actors... she avoided them because she herself was naive and had never bothered to question what was going on around her; she had accepted things that happened to her in her past at face value, and never really confronted them.

The book's plot hinges around Evelyn and her business neighbor Della trying to save their repurposed boat sheds with prime waterfront property from being purchased by a modern fish 'n' chips restaurant chain. At Della's urging, Evelyn allows her "museum" to take the lead in a human interest campaign to save them for the town and prevent the outside investment by a (presumably predatory) enterprise. For the first half, or more, of the book, though, I really couldn't understand why it was compelling to try to save this "museum" to begin with. After they tried to find connections to some of the objects, it was clear that saving the museum was just serving as an entry point to a small-town story of community and rediscovery, but the museum of lost things and Evelyn's backstory was all rather pathetic and trivial and really didn't hold up for me.

As a feel-good story about community building and giving everyone around you a second chance, I also felt that this book underdelivered. All of the stories involved someone in a previous generation lying to their children or grandchildren, with the "feel-good" conclusion being that the younger generation (the book's protagonists), upon learning the truths, all individually conclude that it's better to have the truths out in the open in order to build positive relationships with the people around them, than it is to hide uncomfortable realities and deceive your children and neighbors. It was all much more superficial and predictable than the deeper issues in RBC. None of the characters in this book had much depth, and the seemed to share a unifying character trait of not wanting to do anything to better themselves or their situations until this outside force came in and threatened them. Evelyn in particular struck me as a frustrating character with little to define her aside from her reactions to things that had happened in her past.

Additionally, it annoyed me that Evelyn spent the entire book (as a mid-60s woman) desperately wanting to understand her parentage, after having spent the previous 50 years just sitting around and hoping that her unknown birth mother would come in and talk to her about a piece of lace in her junk display. It felt contrived and overly shallow - as if the author found a tick-list of tropes that are selling right now and tried to slot them all into the book (feel-good, community building, small town, rustic/sea setting, older protagonist, family secrets...).

CW: domestic violence. While it wasn't super graphic, it felt a bit off-color in the way it was depicted, and it annoyed me that that particular dimension was even in the story at all. Are there no other struggles that female characters can have that don't involve abuse at the hands of men close to them? Unnecessary and poorly addressed in this book in particular.

Even worse: one of the suggested "book club questions" at the end of the book asks if the abused woman should have left her abusive partner sooner. WTF people.

Read for First Reads June 2026. Meh. It was fine, I suppose - not particularly memorable, and just enough of a "mystery" to hold interest. That said, the mystery is pretty predictable, and the setup for our main character to even start investigating feels pretty contrived (her boss sends her to go clean out his dead great uncle's house, without telling her how he even knows anything about her history... uh... ok...).

The main character in the modern timeline actually spends a large percentage of her page-time cleaning houses, which isn't particularly exciting to read about - her high school friend owns a cleaning company, and there is a lot of description of the laundry, the vacuuming, getting cleaning supplies for the business, picking up trash on the floor, sorting papers, etc etc etc. They never seem to eat anything except hamburgers, and her friend is pretty infuriating as a character, particularly later in the book when we learn how well her business is (not) going.

I don't mind a split timeline book, but I wish this one had been a tad more immersive in the historical timeline. The historical story takes place during World War II and follows an Austrian woman escaping both Nazi-controlled Austria and her abusive husband on a ship bound for New York City. I had a hard time imagining the scenes on the ship though - this wasn't an ocean liner like Titanic, and it wasn't a cargo ship either... but it was hard to imagine exactly what it would have been like with the little description we got. It was also weird having the historical perspective for the Austrian woman be first-person - but with flawless modern English for her inner thoughts. It seems like a 3rd person narrator would have felt less jarring.

There is a bit of a romance subplot in this one, which fortunately doesn't take the headline until the last 50 or so pages, but it was pretty obvious from the start that it was going to be there. I didn't love it, and I don't think it was necessary. (Also, it was just so tropey and borderline cringey... mid-twenties girl just got out of a bad marriage and is being confronted by some traumatic memories from her teen years, and attractive conveniently un-partnered guy from her past just happens to be in town and happy to help her through it.)

This may sound nitpicky, but I was incredibly annoyed by the way SCUBA diving is presented in this book. It reminded me a lot of the issues I had with The Amalfi Curse last year, which had some similarities in that the main character is the daughter of a professional diver, dove all the time with her parent as a teenager and has tons of experience, but a rookie mistake in the past caused trauma that comes back in the book (and when the scenarios are described, they're not really believable given the amount of experience these divers are supposed to have). In this book, the author actually makes the mistake of describing dives in terms of numbers and specifics. At one point, a guy panics on a dive and surfaces after being down for about 20 minutes without telling his divemaster. When questioned about his depth, he said he was diving at 150 ft (and he didn't even make it to the final depth of the dive). The rest of his group, which presumably did make it to the final depth, was down there for an hour. Practices and standards vary by dive organization/certification, but most recreational dives are under 100 ft, and even with advanced certification, rec divers wouldn't be diving below safety limits of 120 ft (and the dive time would likely be limited).

There is NO WAY even an independent dive operator would take clients (experienced or not) on a recreational wreck dive, on standard air, below 120 feet, and certainly not for an hour. To get to that depth the dive would be considered technical diving, on specialized air mixtures with specialized training. (But wrecks found off the Outer Banks are between 90 and 120 feet anyway, so why would these guys need to go deeper than 150?) And if the guy had actually been at 150 ft for 20 minutes and surfaced without a safety stop or without the slow ascent required, he would have been showing symptoms of nitrogen poisoning. He would have been in pretty bad shape.

The lack of basic fact-checking on the diving portions of the book made me question the fact-checking on historical portions as well. Overall, I'd say don't read the book if you're looking for a good realistic story with historical elements... be willing to suspend some disbelief for this.

When I first started reading this, I was struck by how similar the setup was to Recursion, by Blake Crouch, and wondered why no one was talking about it. The speculative "science" used in this book is nearly identical to the technology that Crouch uses in Recursion. In both books, a non-technical but incredibly rich megalomaniac constructs a secret lab and hires physicists and neurobiologists to build a device that captures and replays "memories", allowing the subject to time travel to his own recorded memories. Both evil masterminds argue that the technology can be used to improve alzheimers patients' lives, and for un-writing the bad events of the world, while of course secretly planning to use it for their own ends. In both books, the technology developed involves immersion in a sensory deprivation tank and a drug injection - although in Crouch's book they rely on drugs the human brain itself has been known to produce on death. And both books rely on the male protagonist's main motivation for returning to the past being the sudden death of a daughter.

At first, I thought the similarities were almost suspicious - aside from the writing style and tone, everything was lining up a little too well. I still can't explain the mechanical similarities, but this is definitely not just a lit-fic version of Crouch's thriller. The technology in Lightbreakers rather quickly takes a backseat to the more philosophical questions of how one determines truth and reality given that all memory is incorrect / incomplete, whereas Crouch's book keeps the tech and the time travel at the center of the plot and the action.

I wasn't a huge fan of Recursion because I felt that the characters were underdeveloped and that the book focused too much on the exaggerated, escalating conflict over who had the rights to use and build the technology. But in Lightbreakers, I found the focus on the characters' personal challenges overly frustrating. Maya and Eileen felt like the same person to me, just with different experiences, and Noah was portrayed as immature and weak through all phases of life we see - incapable of making good decisions and figuring himself out, and waiting for others to tell him who he is and what makes sense for him.

My biggest issue with this book, though, was how slowly it moved but still failed to fully develop the many ideas it was presenting. It had an ambitious concept, weaving together themes of grief and loss, children of intercultural marriages and the challenge of defining what is "home", self-definition through vocation and relationships, art (and the art world of reviewing art, making art, and expression through color and movement), and of course memory and the unchangeable nature of the past defining the future. The writing was beautiful, particularly when it came to describing the characters making and experiencing art, but when it came to the characters' thoughts and conversations, it felt like the author was deliberately talking over the readers' heads. I was reminded a bit of My Friends, where every other thought/statement from a character needed to be a philosophical revelation on the human condition.

In the end, I had to treat this book like a school assignment to get through it - which is really disappointing, because I think the concepts and the writing had a lot of potential to be something really immersive and enjoyable.