In Five Years

This post is a review of In Five Years by Rebecca Serle. About a year ago while on a trip to the Netherlands, one of the girls I was traveling with was reading this book. She, like me, was an avid book reader and enjoyed a lot of the same books that I did. A year later, I finally read it.

If you know me, then you know that I’m the type of person that will happy cry or sad cry or angry cry or hungry cry or basically any other type of cry when I feel an emotion stronger than a 5. This book had me in tears the entire last half and I wouldn’t change it for anything.

The entire concept is that in the beginning of the book, you are introduced to Dannie, the female MC, and her fiancé, David. Their lives are predictably mundane and predictably exciting. On the night of their engagement, Dannie has a dream set five years in the future (side note: in the year 2025, yikes) where she’s not only not engaged to her fiancé anymore, but also living in a different apartment with a different man and a different engagement ring.

Very quickly in the series, we meet Dannie’s best friend, Bella. She’s the whimsical, blonde, artsy type that we all secretly wish we could be like. The first half the book is almost so boring that you want to stop reading - we hear about the same routine, the same dinners, the same events over and over. The point is to prove just how routine Dannie’s life is and to learn how she thinks.

I’ve had the privilege of loving two sick people in my life. One, my late aunt, a breast cancer survivor. The other, a friend, who struggled with severe mental health issues and a growth in her brain (apparently benign, or as benign as a non-cancerous growth in your brain can be). For those that have shared in the experience of loving someone who is fighting their own battle with health, you understand the desperation, the fear, the begging the universe or God or whatever you believe in to make your loved one just a little bit better or for them to have the smallest break from the pain.

In Five Years, the author beautifully conveys this experience as Bella falls sick to what it at first presumed to be a curable cancer. From the moment of her first diagnosis, the reader is captured in Dannie’s thoughts and desperate attempts to solve an unsolvable process. The reader isn’t taken on the journey of romance, drama, and heartbreak that we anticipate, but instead read a story of friendship lasting years until Bella’s final moments. It’s heartbreaking, sad, and poignant - it also provides a sense of comfort for those readers who have supported someone fighting their own disease.

For sensitive readers, no scene is graphic in the death or dying process. Our main character isn’t one who shares her every innermost thought with the reader, so we aren’t forced to endure the graphic details that go along with the storyline. For readers wanting a spicy romance, this book is not going to give you what you’re looking for.

If you’re looking for a heartbreaking story of sisterhood and lifelong friendship, then this book is for you.

I’m not sure if this book will be a re-read for me, but it is one that had me ugly crying in the final chapters, and for that, I love it.

Talk soon,

Mary