Ugh, GUYSSSS. This book was SO SAD. I’m going to be real upfront with you, this book is not what I expected, whatsoever, and I’m going to do my best to not spoil it for you either. I think there’s something magic in the book I expected to get, becoming the book I got – and I wouldn’t want to ruin it for anyone. Whoever wrote this synopsis did a lovely job. Specifically, “In Five Years is an unforgettable love story, but it is not the one you’re expecting.” It certainly was not.

Dannie is a corporate lawyer, living exactly the life she planned for herself in New York. Her best friend is her total opposite: free-spirited and loving and flitting from one thing to next. But Dannie is okay with that; she’s content with her own life and knows Bella’s is far different.

Until the night she gets her dream job and gets engaged, when she falls asleep and wakes up in what is certainly not a dream but most definitely a vision of the future – five years from now, in a different apartment, with a different man. When she returns to her present, she lives with this haunting memory until the day she meets that man in person, four and a half years later.

Honestly, that’s really all I can tell you without spoilers! But if this description sounds good to you, buckle up. This is not the ride you think it is.

Somewhere around the halfway point of this book, things took a sharp right turn, I started sobbing, and I haven’t stopped since. I cannot relay to you the beauty of this book in words, and how it made me feel. The characters were incredible and whole, and while I felt at first that they were too perfectly cast to be real, I know now that that’s the point of the story, and what can be drawn from it.

One interesting thing I noted was that Dannie’s perspective is very robotic. You understand right from the beginning that she’s very Type-A, she lives things exactly according to plan and thrives in environments of her own making. But her voice gains strength throughout the novel: as she’s forced to step outside and feel, you can see the change in her perspective and her dialogue, the way she interacts with others. It’s like a blending between two extremes (you’ll see!) that leaves her a little bit better than we found her, prepared to move on to something greater. Again, it’s so hard to review this book without ruining it for you. I want everyone to experience, the shock, the grief, the love that this book has to offer, without my having tainted it.

This book flew by for me. Whenever I picked it up, I could hardly put it down. You’ve been warned. 🙂 I highly recommend In Five Years.

An advance copy of In Five Years was provided to me by the publisher through NetGalley. It was released March 10, 2020.