Astrid Hawk
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. 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.