The Dinner List by Rebecca Serle

⭐️⭐️⭐️ 3/5

✅ Would recommend- if this fits your preferences, go for it!

Published by MacMillan Audio September 11th, 2018

Magical Realism

Star-Crossed Lovers

🌶️ 2/5- fade to black or behind closed doors, implied but not described too explicitly

📖 288 pages

🎧 5 hours, 5 minutes

⚠️ Trigger warnings: death, car accident, drunk driving, vehicle hits pedestrian, miscarriage, late term pregnancy loss, parent estrangement, parent death, fiance death, graphic descriptions of physical trauma, pregnancy, infidelity, alcoholism

🤓 SUMMARY 🤓 

If you could have dinner with anyone, living or dead, who would it be– Sabrina never expects to find herself at dinner with her list, but here she is with her best friend, her ex, her estranged father, her favorite college professor, and Audrey Hepburn.

👀 REVIEW 👀  

I didn’t hate this book, but I didn’t love this book. I found it difficult to follow the characters (I kept confusing the father and professor at dinner) and found the relationship between Sabrina and Tobias frustrating. I fully accept that doomed relationships exist in the real world and what happened to them could have happened in real life– but I would be annoyed by the story if it came from a friend, too– the story came from immature choice after immature choice. 

There wasn’t a lot of diversity, especially for New York City, but it was a small cast of characters so there wasn’t a ton of room for it. I found Sabrina whiny and unreasonable, Tobias shallow and selfish, Jessica detached but frustrated when others returned the disinterest, Conrad too optimistic, Robert stuck in his own past and unaccountable unless he can be the victim, and Audrey Hepburn too one-dimensional. Honestly, my favorite character was Matty- he was level headed, encouraging while remaining realistic.

NOTE: I read through the story as if all guests were actually present. I realized while writing this review that if you consider that the guests might only be a projection of Sabrina’s mind, that would explain all the faults I found in each of the characters as that’s how she saw them individually.

Online reviews say the themes are “love, loss, friendship, forgiveness, and the complexities of relationships” but I found the real focus to be on repeatedly trying to make something work that couldn’t. Even when the twist was revealed, Sabrina held on to hope that she could “fix” things when they were so evidently not possible. I appreciated the way Jessica called her out on this at the dinner, but where were people when Tobias left the first time? Even when she “moved on,” Sabrina was never all in on being all out of it; she continued to save something for someone who put in work in direct detriment of their relationship. Through all the on-again-off-agains of their 9 year relationship, neither Sabrina nor Tobias had the best interest of the other person or their relationship as its own entity at heart. “People in relationships are either flowers or gardeners. Two flowers shouldn't partner; they need someone to support them, to help them grow.” This garden was past a neglected patch of weeds, you have to wonder how many harmful things were planted on purpose…

There was an unexpected twist that wasn’t done poorly- the entire premise of the story sounds great as an outline as a way for the FMC to come to terms with her past. But it just fell flat for me. I wasn’t excited to get back to the story when I had to take a break and kind of slogged through it. It might hit the mark for others which is why I didn’t say I’d take back my time if I could, but I’ll be skeptical to read others from this author.