The second home

Wellfleet, Massachusetts wasn't necessarily a logical summer destination for a family from Milwaukee, but Cape Cod has a way of drawing the Gordons back. After unlocking the door to their old saltbox-style house, the family always seems to breathe a little easier. Ed and Connie are teachers, and summers are their time to unwind. Their daughters, Ann and Poppy, love exploring the beach and making friends with the local kids. When Ed and Connie adopt teenaged Michael, they think he'll love Cape Cod as much as they do--and he does, until a secret threatens to upend his life forever. Decades later, Ann has to decide what to do with the old house and, more importantly, what to do about Michael. A riveting family saga that fans of J. Courtney Sullivan, Cristina Alger, and Maria De Los Santos will devour, Clancy's debut novel is a delight. She flips between decades, immersing the reader in sun-soaked Wellfleet summers before traveling to the present day and back again. With nostalgia as thick as the scent of coconut-scented sunscreen, The Second Home explores the consequences of emotional decisions and the strength needed to set things right.

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. (June)

A single summer at their Cape Cod vacation home shatters the harmony among the three Gordon teenagers, splitting them off on separate, life-altering trajectories. With its fond descriptions of Cape Cod's land- and seascapes and an evocation of a historic house layered with love and secrets, Clancy's debut clearly has its eye firmly set on the summer-read market. Her family-based story is narrated from the perspectives of Ed and Connie Gordon's children--daughters Ann and Poppy and son Michael, whom they adopted after his mother died when he was 16. The kindly, pot-smoking Gordon parents are teachers based in Milwaukee, but the family's summers are always spent on the East Coast, in the comfy saltbox house originally owned by the children's great-grandfather. It's there, in 1999, that fractures develop, as Ann starts babysitting for the Shaw family and Poppy begins to break away, to surf and take drugs. Michael, a mistrustful teen with a history of abuse, is attracted to Ann, and his feelings might be reciprocated, but the budding--if inappropriate--attraction between them is eclipsed by an unhealthy relationship that develops between Ann and Anthony Shaw, father of her charges. The older man's pursuit of 17-year-old Ann will lead to a crossroads for her and for Michael, too, as manipulative Anthony enmeshes both of them in an intricate tangle of lies and deception. Clancy's novel rests heavily on this plot point, a not-entirely-solid structure that raises questions of credibility for the remainder of the tale. The story jumps forward to 2015, when a reckoning on the future of the house must be made even though the three siblings are still pulling in different directions. While matters head toward not unexpected resolutions, the immersiveness of this holiday read remains hobbled by cool characters and an implausible plot. The uninterrupted sunshine of a beach read is clouded by its awkward structure. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.