The Dinner List: A Novel by Rebecca Serle (Nicole Schlinger Book Review)
This book was on my waitlist for several months before its debut.
What’s not to love? An ambitious young woman makes a list in college of the five people, living or dead, she’d like to have dinner with … and on her 30th birthday, she shows up an hour late at the restaurant to find those five people gathered around the table.
Well, it turns out there’s a lot not to love about this story.
It’s melodramatic.
By the time you are 30 years old, you should not be having dramatic fights with your college roommate because she’s gotten married and grown up.
Yes, it’s certainly tragic that she didn’t get to know her father while he was alive.
It’s tragic that her longtime boyfriend died too soon. And we spend every other chapter in a flashback with Sabrina blindly failing to understand what was wrong with this relationship.
In every chapter that features the five guests at the restaurant, someone either crying or crying out. Audrey Hepburn is oddly out of place, and hardly figures into the plotline.
And to make matters worse, I just could never get myself to really care about this self-aborbed woman.
The only redeeming point in this book for me was that it made me think about who I’d like to have dinner with.
Who would you pick?
