In Five Years by Rebecca Serle

3.5 Stars

It took me a while to get myself centred with this book and to understand where the author was coming from.  It is a place so alien to me this may as well have been a science fiction novel - in all honesty when the year 2025 is first mentioned I thought that is what it was, then reality hit and I realised that is only 5 years away.  Where did the time go?

The story centres around Dannie, a very definite Type-A personality who is determined to make her way in the cutthroat world of Corporate Law.  We join her as she goes for the most important job interview of her life (an naturally aces it) and then gets proposed to by her longterm, equally ambitious, partner and cohabitee David.  Everything seems to be coming up roses.  Then she falls asleep and has a premonitory dream that she can't shake where it is 15th December 2025 and she is in a strange apartment that seems to be hers and with a man who is very definitely NOT David.

Once I got over the shock of how close 2025 really is I did enjoy reading this book.  I was just incredibly frustrated by Dannie, she is completely obsessed by this dream.  Whilst I get that it shook her I couldn't understand why she couldn't just "shake it off" and get on with whatever life threw at her without having to look for signs that it was in fact endeavouring to come true.  Spoiler Alert - the whole premise of the story is that it does come true but only because Dannie seems to manufacture it that way.  It just felt to me that she was willing it to happen.

What saved it for me was her relationship with childhood friend Bella.  This is where the magic happens on the page.  The slotting together of two wildly different personalities is achieved organically and they genuinely feel like friends who know each other and the author manages to give us a glimpse into their lives without making it feel forced.  It does have a vaguely sapphic undertow though that never gets explored fully, instead being depicted as a more sisterly love and devotion that felt, to this reader, like the author had been discouraged from taking it down that route when really that is where she wanted to place things.

This is Rebecca Serle's second book and again it plays with themes of time, place and might have beens.  This is slightly more successful than The Dinner List in this regard but it still left me feeling like it was full of missed opportunities.

THIS IS AN HONEST AND UNBIASED REVIEW OF A FREE COPY OF THE BOOK PROVIDED BY THE PUBLISHERS VIA AMAZON.CO.UK