For my first book review of 2022, I chose In Five Years by Rebecca Serle. Serle based her novel around a common interview question, “Where do you see yourself in five years?”

Dannie is living her best life. Everything is going according to plan. She just aced her interview with a prestigious New York law firm - the corporate law firm she has dreamed of working at since she was a little girl visiting the Big Apple with her dad. Her boyfriend David has just proposed at the Rainbow Room and presented her with the perfect engagement ring. Everything is perfect until she falls asleep and wakes up five years in the future.

Dannie isn’t in her dream apartment. She’s wearing a different engagement ring and David has been replaced by a fair-haired Adonis who makes love to her with a hunger and intensity Dannie has never experienced. For one hour she has another life. Is it a dream? Dannie can’t shake the feeling that this is her future, but it’s not in her five-year plan.

She confides a few details with her best friend Bella but doesn’t reveal she and the stranger Aaron had sex. Bella is convinced it is a crazy dream or a premonition… a manifestation of Dannie’s true feelings about David. Dannie isn’t so sure. David is kind and generous. He wants the same things and like Dannie, he is willing to sacrifice to get them. He may be predictable, but they never argue.

Dannie vows to do everything she can to right the future and end up with David and the life they have planned.

Serle breezes through the next four and a half years with Dannie progressing in her career. Bella flits from one romance to the next and Dannie and David are so busy they never get around to setting a wedding date.

When Bella tells Dannie she’s met someone special named Greg, Dannie thinks it will end in disaster like all Bella’s other relationships. Imagine Dannie’s shock when Greg turns out to be Aaron Gregory the man from her “future.” Dannie shifts into high gear to protect her future and not betray her friend Bella.

She sets a wedding date and tries to plan a wedding by December 15, the date on the television in her dream/premonition but work and a friend’s health crisis threaten to derail everything.

I can’t tell you what happens next because it would spoil the book but let me warn you this is not the “feel good happy ending romance” you were expecting. It turns serious very quickly and reminds us of the old saying, “You can’t choose your family, but your friends can be the family you choose.”

Rebecca Serle is an author and screen writer in Los Angeles. She is the author of six novels and she codeveloped the TV adaptation of her YA series, Famous in Love on Freeform. Her seventh novel is scheduled for release March 1, 2022.

Books by Rebecca Serle:

The Edge of Falling (YA 2014)

Famous in Love (YA 2014)

Truly Madly Famously (YA 2015)

The Dinner List (2018)

When You were Mine (YA 2020)

In Five Years (2021)

One Italian Summer (March 1, 2022)

Photo of Rebecca Serle courtesy of rebeccaserle.com

Photo of book jacket courtesy of rebeccaserle.com