Review: In Five Years

Title: In Five Years
Author: Rebecca Serle
Genre: Fiction, Contemporary, Romance
Publisher: Simon and Schuster Canda
Source: Publisher via NetGalley
Format: Ebook
Release Date: March 10, 2020
Rating: ★★★★★

Goodreads Synopsis:

Where do you see yourself in five years?

When Type-A Manhattan lawyer Dannie Cohan is asked this question at the most important interview of her career, she has a meticulously crafted answer at the ready. Later, after nailing her interview and accepting her boyfriend’s marriage proposal, Dannie goes to sleep knowing she is right on track to achieve her five-year plan.

But when she wakes up, she’s suddenly in a different apartment, with a different ring on her finger, and beside a very different man. The television news is on in the background, and she can just make out the scrolling date. It’s the same night—December 15—but 2025, five years in the future.

After a very intense, shocking hour, Dannie wakes again, at the brink of midnight, back in 2020. She can’t shake what has happened. It certainly felt much more than merely a dream, but she isn’t the kind of person who believes in visions. That nonsense is only charming coming from free-spirited types, like her lifelong best friend, Bella. Determined to ignore the odd experience, she files it away in the back of her mind.

That is, until four-and-a-half years later, when by chance Dannie meets the very same man from her long-ago vision.

Brimming with joy and heartbreak, In Five Years is an unforgettable love story that reminds us of the power of loyalty, friendship, and the unpredictable nature of destiny.

Review:

Dannie has her life planned out for the next five years. Everything is going exactly as planned when she lands her dream job and gets engaged. However, she has a dream that she wakes up in a strange apartment with a strange man exactly five years later. She thinks it must be a dream, until she meets that man. She becomes conflicted between following her trajectory or continuing toward the life she saw in her future.

My feelings toward Dannie’s situation kept changing throughout the book. At first, I was sure that the future Dannie saw wouldn’t happen. She was meant to be with David and live in their dream apartment. However, something happens halfway through that changed my mind about the future. Suddenly, Dannie’s goals didn’t seem as certain as they did at the beginning.

I read a book last year, where the author spoke about the invisible staircase. We think that we can see the direction that our life is heading, but the future is actually an invisible staircase because we can’t see what will happen. When we go through hard times, we think it will stay that way forever, but we can’t predict what will happen in the future. We only realize this when we look back a few years and realize we have changed a lot in that time. I was reminded of this idea throughout this book. Dannie thinks she can see what she’s planned for the next five years, but then she sees that she will be in completely different circumstances in five years. It also brings up the question of fate, and whether we can change things that will happen or if they are planned out, even if we try to take a different route.

I loved this book and I highly recommend it!

Thank you Simon and Schuster Canada for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

What to read next:

Have you read In Five Years? What did you think of it?