Publication Date: July 4, 2023
If clothes can get a second chance, why can’t we? Brimming with life, love, and the stories bound up in even the most everyday items, The Second Chance Store is a tale of friendship, loss, and dusting yourself off and starting over—a novel filled with humor and a testament to the enduring power and joy of charity shops.
City dweller Gwen feels like she’s living a secondhand life. She’s thirty-eight, perpetually single, and in dire need of a dentist’s appointment. Her friends are busy procreating in the country, and conversations with her parents seem to revolve entirely around hedge borders and the trash pickup schedule. Above all she’s lonely. But then, isn’t everyone?
Then she’s let go from a job she drifted into a decade ago and never left, and Gwen realizes it’s time to make a change, starting with cleaning out her apartment. In the charity shop where she literally and metaphorically unloads her baggage, she discovers a group of weird and wonderful people devoted to finding a new home for donated items that have lost their use elsewhere. Gwen volunteers there—and finds a new home for herself among her fellow workers while discovering joy in the untold stories of secondhand things.
Now it’s time for Gwen to get out of her life in pause, and to find a way to move forward with bravery and humanity—and more regular dental care.
In Lauren Bravo’s novel, The Second Chance Store, Gwen Grundle finds herself “redundant” and terminated from her job. It wasn’t one she enjoyed particularly, but one that was comfortable, familiar, and undemanding—just like the rest of her life.
Gwen has come face-to-face with a professional and very personal dilemma and must search to discover what she wants—really wants—from her life and what will cause her to feel fulfilled and even—happy.
When Gwen drops off some personal items at the neighborhood second chance store, the sign—“Volunteers Urgently Needed” catches her eye, and she thinks to herself how nice it would be to be “urgently needed.” She becomes a volunteer, and from that point on, the novel is a series of encounters and interactions with not only some of Gwen’s quirky fellow volunteers and their personalities but also Gwen’s rather depressing, soul-searching journey.
Interspersed among the novel’s chapters are sometimes clever back histories of items typically found in a secondhand store, and with a clever twist, some of these items are or become a part of the novel’s story.
Gwen’s long and winding road of self-discovery drags the reader along for the ride. Navigating a tortuous mental minefield, including the loss of a brother and calling off her wedding, Gwen forges doggedly ahead, sure that even in the mind-numbing state she typically finds herself, surely, the road ahead will open up to reveal brighter skies.
Sure to appeal to those familiar with London locales and British TV shows, The Second Chance Store by Lauren Bravo is unfortunately difficult for one not living in the UK to fully appreciate or grasp the novel’s numerous British distinctions and nuances. The novel would have also benefited greatly from a professional editor’s thorough review and elimination of tedious facts, superfluous side stories, and excessive and unnecessary detail (i.e., there was an entire chapter on the various uses of a scarf).
The story’s plot plodded along with Gwen’s slowly blooming self-realization, personality growth, and the comprehension that it’s not just the struggles that come your way but how you deal with them that can make the biggest difference of all.
Much like the charity store it depicts, The Second Chance Store novel brims with a wide variety of unusual items and people that will simultaneously puzzle and fascinate you with their mysterious, untold stories. 
Lauren Bravo is an author and award-winning freelance journalist who writes about fashion, popular culture, food, travel, and feminism. She is the author of What Would the Spice Girls Do? and How to Break Up with Fast Fashion—which was inspired by her yearlong fast-fashion ban—and a contributor to the intersectional feminist essay collection This Is How We Come Back Stronger: Feminist Writers on Turning Crisis into Change. Lauren volunteers once a week at her local Crisis UK charity shop, which provided rich and bountiful inspiration for her debut novel The Second Chance Store (as well as a chance to get first dibs on all the best clothes).
