The Novel In Five Years by Rebecca Serle tells the story of a woman who had her whole life planned out. Dannie Kohan knows exactly what she wants in life five years from now:she will have her dream job as a lawyer at the best law firm in New York city, she will live in a beautiful apartment in her favorite part of the city, and she will be married to her perfect boyfriend, David. But after the night that is supposed to cement the future she wants, she goes to sleep and somehow gets a glimpse five years into the future, and it doesn’t go along with what she has planned. She is in a different apartment, and the decor is shall we say, not to her taste, there’s an engagement ring on her finger, but David isn’t the man sleeping next to her in bed. For the next five years, Dannie will push this dream to the farthest corners of her mind, she will plan even more to ensure that what she saw in that dream doesn’t happen. There is however one thing Dannie doesn’t account for, and that is the unpredictably and sometimes curle nature of life.
Rebecca Serles’ gorgeous writing will bring you into a world of love, loss, and unpredictability, and will make these characters feel like life long friends. In Five Years invites readers to challenge the aspects of their lives that seem set in stone, realize that not everything is in our control, and to search for invisible, passionate, true love. I read this book in one sitting and loved it from the first sentence to the last page. It made me laugh and broke my heart.
The story line is also timely—due to the pandemic, millions of people are imagining what the next five years of their lives are going to look like, myself included. I started college this fall, and it’s not quite the experience I was expecting but it’s the one I’m getting. Like Dannie, I’m a planner. I plan everything, I knew my major and the job I thought I wanted after college, but the world shut down and now I’ve got more time to think about what I want and what makes me happy, not only in a professional sense but also in a personal one, what kind of relationships to do I want to have, what kind of love do I want in my life. This book has taught me to expect the unexpected, and when it comes to love that everyone deserves, a once-in-a-lifetime love. I hope after reading this you open the next tab to amazon and buy this book, but if you aren’t convinced yet, I’ll end this with one of my favorite quotes from the book, “I wish you understood that you could have love beyond your wildest dreams. Stuff movies are made of. You’re meant for that too” (Serle 205).