Books: Second Time Around
Second Time Around by Marcia Willett
Can you live with your extended family? - 4 Stars ****
By Gabrielle Pantera
HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 1/9/2009 - “I’m driven by characters,” says Second Time Around author Marcia Willett. “They first appear as shadows and then gradually I learn more about them. It’s as if I’m listening to them telling me their stories. It’s my job to put those stories on paper. That means I don’t really get ideas, but rather I find I’m living in a parallel universe with a group of people. It can be great fun.”
Marcia Willett is a gifted writer. In Second Time Around, Mathilda Rainbird wills her English seaside home to three distant relatives shortly before her death. The three can sell or move in. All Mathilda’s relatives are single and very independent, just like she was. Will Rainbird is a widower and has recently retired from his job. Beatrice Holmes, has also just retired from her job as a matron at a boys’ prep school. Tessa Rainbird, the youngest of the three, was orphaned as a young child. She runs her own business. Will they sell or move in?
“This book was written twelve years ago, although it’s only just published in the U.S.,” says Willett. “St Martin’s Press is publishing my new books more or less as they come out and in between they’re publishing the back list, of which Second Time Around is one. It will be some years yet before all of my titles have been published in the States.”
Willett started writing in 1993, and her first book was published in 1995. “My husband’s business failed in the recession that we had here in the UK in the early 1990s,” says Willett. “I wanted to do something to help the family finances. The questions was what, as I had no training other than as a ballet dancer. Who wants to employ a fifty year old one-time ballet dancer? Roddy, my husband, persuaded me to write. He believed I’d be able to write a book that was publishable. In the end I said, ‘OK I’ll write a book but you’ll have to sell it’. So I did, and he did.”
“Both my publishers are both lovely,” says Willett. “I find their comments very valuable. I have another eleven books published in the UK, with one in production and one I’m presently writing. A great thrill is being published in a number of other countries including the U.S. I understand Second Time Around is being read by a film company on the west coast of the U.S.”
Marcia Willett was born in a tiny village in Somerset, England and is currently based in Devon, England.
“I want to give thanks to everyone involved…my editors, book sellers and above all my readers, especially the hundreds who’ve sent me letters and e-mails which always seem to arrive just when they are most needed, on a day when one’s confidence is on the floor and the whole thing seems to be a terrible mistake,” says Willett.
Second Time Around is a moving story that shows how people who have no close family bond get a second chance to get things right. Willett’s descriptions of the countryside are vivid. As you read the story flows. Willett’s writing style is easy, and pleasant when you’ve finished reading for your mind goes back over things in the book.
Second Time Around by Marcia Willett
Trade Paperback, 1st U.S. edition
304 pages
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin
Release Date: December 9, 2008
ISBN 9780312306663
