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A review by chloe_liese
In Five Years by Rebecca Serle
5.0
“It feels impossible how much space there can be in this intimacy, how much privacy. And I think that maybe that is what love is. Not the absence of space but the acknowledgment of it, the thing that lives between the parts, the thing that makes it possible not to be one, but to be different, to be two.”
Well damn. This book hit me in the feels with its bittersweet themes of love and loss, its tone of melancholy sadness. I was sometimes underwhelmed by the driving conflict and force behind the narrative, hungering for a moment or two of higher energy and higher stakes. I read this expecting a kind of edgy women's fiction love story, and it really wasn't. It was a story about personal growth and friendship.
At times, it felt as if this book was tugged between two directions: to explore a previously done "what-if"/alternate life question of love and destiny, and to dive into the depths of female friendship love. Sometimes this book seemed like it was having an identity crisis of sorts and lost some of its punch in that wavering, but what redeemed it for me and elevated it to a 5-star read came down to two things:
- The prose. Serle got an MFA from a no-slouch school and it shows. Reading her writing is staring at fine art, it's the perfect sunset, sinking into that delicious, just right temperature bath. Her writing is practically perfect to me. She writes economically, poignantly, and with a sharp bare-bones style that I adore. It felt "literary" not in a detached sense, but in an intimate, confessional, frank voice.
- The ending. It wasn't what I expected and that was a relief. The sadness in the penultimate scene was swept away by a quiet twist of hope. I closed the book on a happy sigh, and was reminded of the power in an exceptional ending.
Well damn. This book hit me in the feels with its bittersweet themes of love and loss, its tone of melancholy sadness. I was sometimes underwhelmed by the driving conflict and force behind the narrative, hungering for a moment or two of higher energy and higher stakes. I read this expecting a kind of edgy women's fiction love story, and it really wasn't. It was a story about personal growth and friendship.
At times, it felt as if this book was tugged between two directions: to explore a previously done "what-if"/alternate life question of love and destiny, and to dive into the depths of female friendship love. Sometimes this book seemed like it was having an identity crisis of sorts and lost some of its punch in that wavering, but what redeemed it for me and elevated it to a 5-star read came down to two things:
- The prose. Serle got an MFA from a no-slouch school and it shows. Reading her writing is staring at fine art, it's the perfect sunset, sinking into that delicious, just right temperature bath. Her writing is practically perfect to me. She writes economically, poignantly, and with a sharp bare-bones style that I adore. It felt "literary" not in a detached sense, but in an intimate, confessional, frank voice.
- The ending. It wasn't what I expected and that was a relief. The sadness in the penultimate scene was swept away by a quiet twist of hope. I closed the book on a happy sigh, and was reminded of the power in an exceptional ending.