The Dinner List by Rebecca Serle

Cover Art Courtesy of Goodreads

I was in desperate need of a short, fluffy read, and I thought The Dinner List by Rebecca Serle would be the perfect answer. This was a Book of the Month pick for me a few months back, and the gorgeous yellow cover drew me right to it. Well, fluffy, this coming of age contemporary was not. But I did really enjoy it!

You know the premise. If you could have dinner with any 5 people, living or dead, who would they be? But Sabrina never expects to actually get to have that dinner. Yet on her thirtieth birthday, she walks into the restaurant and there they all are: Audrey Hepburn, her estranged father, her best friend, her favorite college professor, and her ex. Throughout the course of the evening, Sabrina learns and laughs with this unexpected group, as well as reminisces on times both good and bad, and tries to pinpoint what went wrong with the main relationships in her life.

I was not expecting this book to get to my emotions as much as it did. Whether it was the relationship with her estranged father, drifting apart from her best friend, or trying so hard to make a doomed romantic relationship work, I really felt for Sabrina. I saw her grow and mature a lot throughout the dinner, and enjoying seeing how she interacted with and learned from each guest.

This read super quickly, so it was definitely the short read I was looking for. It was just a little more emotional than I was expecting! I liked how it alternated between the dinner scenes themselves (prefaced by times so you knew how much time was left in the night before the group had to disband) and flashbacks to different parts of Sabrina's life.

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars

As a side note, I think my 5 people would be Walt Disney, Stevie Nicks, Princess Diana, my late grandfather, and Steve Irwin.