Review: In Five Years by Rebecca Serle

I will start with the fact that this book just wasn't for me; I'm not going to trash the book, just explain why I am not the reader best positioned to like it.

First, I read this book because I used a book recommendation service (Tailored Book Recommendations), and this was one of three books recommended to me (the other I have already read is The Patient which I hated). I never would have picked this book up otherwise. And I never would have finished reading it if it weren't for wanting to give the person who recommended it to me a fair shot.

In Five Years follows Dannie, a very well measured and hard-core planner who is a lawyer in NYC. We meet her on the day she is being interviewed for her dream job and is going to be proposed to that night, all her plans are coming together perfectly. After her days goes splendidly, she falls asleep and wakes up 5 years in the future with a different man in a different apartment. The next morning she is returned to her normal life and grapples with how different the future is to her plan.

I think I would have liked this book so much better if it had been more of an exploration of her friendship with Bella and had slightly less focus on the 'other man' vs. current man thing. This is not to say the book is a romance; it isn't, I just found the romance distracting. And because the way the book was structured I knew as soon as we met Aaron, the man from the dream, what was going to happen in the rest of the book. Your best friend's new boyfriend who you are sure you will be sleeping within less than a year, I had a pretty clear image of where the book was headed.

I think my knowing where the plot was going to end, both because of the book's conceit and because I guessed the big event very quickly, made this book not a very emotional experience for me. I just wanted to get to the end, not in page-turning excitement more in a hurry up and get there way. It just didn't work for me.

I also just didn't like the way Serle did setting. I just felt like I was reading a list of New York things and not like I was grounded in place. It felt like I was being given filming locations for a movie, not like I was reading about a character experiencing the setting.

Slight spoiler, this book also incorporates a trope I hate. That trope is a sick person whose sickness or death teaches others to embrace life. I just find this idea inherently harmful, and I don't like books using this, especially without critiquing that trope. A dying person being used to show you the happiness you should embrace in life is just something that I cannot do, so now I know that.

I do think this book could have taken many turns that I would have hated, but I can't say I liked it just because I didn't hate it.

I gave this book 2 stars on Goodreads and The StoryGraph. If you wanna read it do, it just isn't a book for me.