In Five Years

One of the main reasons this book stood out to me was because the main character experiences a time jump. One thing to know about me is that I LOVE time jumps, time travel, dimension travel, etc. Before I continue I will say that I read this book in one sitting in just a few hours, so if it's on your list it is a good way to your pass your time.

Recap:

Dannie is a 28 year old lawyer who has her life all planned out. She knows she will be partner at one of the city's best firms, she will live in the perfect apartment in Gramercy Park, and she will marry her boyfriend, David. On the day of her interview she falls asleep in the year 2020, and wakes up in the year 2025. For exactly one hour she experiences her life five years in the future. She is in a different apartment, wearing different clothes, wearing a different engagement ring, and there is a different man in her apartment. She wakes back up in 2020 and is shaken to her core. She then spends the rest of the book trying to grapple with this future and her present.

Thoughts (THERE WILL BE SPOILERS):

- This book wasn't what I would think it would be. I thought this was going to be a romance book where after Dannie experiences the future she has to choose between her current boyfriend and her future boyfriend. While it is a romance (kind of) it is not this.

-Very quickly I realized this book wasn't what I thought. This future man is actually her best friend's boyfriend. So for a good while I thought that they would have an affair. This made me angry because I did not want to root for this. I can say they never did have relationship to root for.

-This book is actually more about friendship. If this book was described with this angle then I think I would have liked it more.

-SPOILER: This is a sick-lit book. This means that one of the characters in this book develops cancer and a large plot point is this illness. I don't normally like books like this so I would have liked to know this before going in. If sick-lit is your thing then I think you will love this book.

-Even though this book was nothing like I thought it would be the ending made sense. When the present caught up to the future, it made sense. I appreciated how all the details connected. Speaking of details...

- There were too many details. This might be a personal thing, but I do not like when authors describe unnecessary things. There were so many moments where I felt like the story was dragging because the author was stating things that were not important for the characterization or the development of the plot.

-SPOILER: There is an epilogue at the end. This ruined the whole book for me.

Throughout the book Dannie sees a therapist to help her make sense of her time jump. In the epilogue she is seen moving forward by visiting the neighborhood deli. She runs into her therapist here and is to be assumed that they begin some sort of relationship. I haaaaaaaaaaate this. I feel so weird about falling for someone that was your patient or falling for your therapist. It feels manipulative? I don't know how to put it into words. It just makes me feel icky. I know it is to show that time moves on and you can move on, but I can't get past the ick.

- SPOILER: I think it would have been a stronger ending if she moved forward without a prospect of a man. She spent 7 years with David and 5 of those she was thinking about a future man. When she wasn't thinking about a man she was thinking about her best friend who has cancer. Even though Dannie claims her whole life is planned out I would like to see her accept that its ok to accept surprises in her life (that don't necessarily need a man).

Overall, this was a decent book that uses friendship as a vehicle to say to treasure every moment of your life, and that sometimes plans don't always work out like you thought they would.

3/5 stars

P.S. This author has another book titled The Dinner List and I am interested in reading that.