Have You Ever Wished for a Second Chance?

Melinda Palacio

We can't get enough of this book. Sedano also offered a review two weeks ago.

 

Mona Alvarado Frazier has spun a tale you won’t want to put down in The Garden of Second Chances. You will get to the end and wish you had savored each chapter and verse. The subject matter, incarcerated girls, might throw you off at first, as well as the labeling of the novel as YA or young adult; don’t be fooled or move on to the next book recommendation. Unless you give this book a chance, you won’t realize that, ultimately, it’s a book about you. Isn’t that what clever authors do? Make you feel as if you were suddenly plopped into the plot?

 

Frazier speaks from experience and for decades worked with incarcerated youth. As an author, she has a way of redeeming all the characters, even the “bad” girls show how the system fails them, after all, these are teenagers. In Juana’s case, the protagonist of The Garden of Second Chances, even the people she loved as a child failed her, from her mother’s early death to the father blaming her for his troubles. Juana never had the chance to be a girl. She finds escape in a young man who is more broken than she will ever be. By the time, Juana realizes this, she is falsely charged with his murder. Her legal problems on the outside become just as difficult to handle and maneuver as her dealings for survival on the inside.

 

This may be a spoiler alert, but there is also a physical garden in the prison, what some facilities describe as Horticulture Therapy. As Juana figures out how to survive and minimize her prison sentence, she experiences all the ugliness of the facility, including time in isolation where she must rely on cherished childhood memories of gardening with her mother. When she follows through with an experimental garden for the incarcerated girls, she also blooms and matures and is in a better place to take control of her life. She is no longer the scared girl who entered the facility. Although the experience hardens her, she rises above the trauma of her prison sentence and takes her second chance.