The Second Chance Home for Girls

The Second Chance Home for Girls is a novel of friendship and freedom, loss and grief, as its main character, a teenager named Summer, is transformed into the parent she never had. The novel opens with the arrival of a teenage girl, Lorilee, who seems peculiar to the girls and staff at the Second Chance Home for Girls, a halfway house for troubled teenaged girls, placed there by bewildered parents and frustrated courts, located on a desolate Texas prairie; wide, flat, and empty, every way for as far as an eye can see. Feared and loathed by most of the Second Chance residents, Lorilee becomes the catalyst for Summer's deep soul-searching and ultimately freedom when violence escalates, and catastrophe determines the outcome of her life and the lives of the others.