Finished: In Five Years (Serle) A fast-paced, tear-jerker which you think is going to be about the relationship between a couple, Dannie and David, but ends up being more about the relationship with Dannie and Bella, her best friend since they were seven years old. It is also the story of how Dannie learns to live life a little differently than she always has, which is very scheduled, very controlled, and very over-achieving. Dannie is a corporate lawyer whose job is definitely number one in her life. When she has a great job interview with the company she's always wanted to be a part of on the same day that her boyfriend of two years, David, proposes, she is over the moon. She's had it all planned out forever. Get engaged at 28, married by 30, make junior partner within a couple of years and move to a house in Gramercy. There just this one thing....when Dannie falls asleep after the exciting evening, she is transported five years into the future. Like most job interviews, they had asked her where she saw herself in five years. Dannie spends one hour five years into the future...but she's not with David, she's with someone named Aaron. And, she's not got the perfect engagement ring on her finger that David picked out, but one totally not her style. And, she's living in an apartment in Brooklyn with very bohemian taste...not at all her type. She has the most amazing sex of her life with Aaron, and then wakes up quite shaken. It was not a dream to her, but a definite experience she had in the future. **I would say, if you want to read this book, don't read any further because you will be spoiled** She shakes it off and goes about her busy work schedule and as the years pass, she and David remain engaged but too busy to set a wedding date. At least, she's too busy. David always seems to understand when she wants to postpone. When 4 1/2 years has gone by, Bella, her spur of the moment, live life to the fullest best friend finally falls in love. She asks Dannie and David to meet them for dinner so she can introduce the man who has finally swept her off her feet. Of course....it's Aaron!! Dannie has a near panic attack and feigns illness to leave abruptly. She goes home with David and tells him they must be married right away. She doesn't know what's going on, but she loves Bella and would never end up with the man she has fallen for. David is pleased, of course, but also a little skeptical that she suddenly wants to get married within two months. For Dannie, as long as it's before the date of her encounter with Aaron, she doesn't care. Dannie comes up extremely busy with work and barely has time to help with the wedding planning. She does become a little less awkward around Aaron when she can see that he adores Bella as much as Bella adores him. And...Bella is pregnant! She's thrilled and then Aaron is thrilled, and then it all goes to hell. :-( Now, the tears start. Bella isn't pregnant after all, but she's got stage three ovarian cancer. The story takes a left turn as you think you can see now what the future will be. David and Dannie, though seemingly perfect for each other, aren't really in love, hence never setting a firm date for the wedding. They call off their wedding and their relationship. Bella, an artist with a trust fund, buys Dannie an amazing apartment in Brooklyn that she designs herself, down to the green tile sinks, blue chairs and wall hangings. It has a perfect view and the color Bella knows Dannie needs in her life. Aaron sticks by Bella through it all and even proposes with the perfect bohemian ring. And after fighting so hard to stay alive, Bella finally dies. It's heartbreaking! After they have a celebration of life for Bella, Aaron takes Dannie home to her apartment where they both feel a certain energy to be together, and so they sleep together and have that amazing sex. Yes, it's now the exact day it was in Dannie's experience. Dannie realizes, though, that they didn't do that out of love or betrayal to Bella. They both did it out of severe grief. And, the engagement ring she saw on her hand was Bella's, but it's not on her ring finger, it's on her middle finger, something she was wearing to feel closer to Bella. They don't regret sleeping together, but they both pull back and decide to just be friends. How about lunch once a week for awhile? Dannie finally understands that the future she had been dreading wasn't how it seemed at all. She also realizes she needs to live life to the fullest, like Bella did. Her career path remains in tact, but her love life picks up with a smidgeon of hope for Dannie for the future, but not with David or Aaron. This was a page-turning story, and a good one! I thank my dear friend Marla for giving me this book for my birthday! :-) 

 Finished: Burger's Daughter (Gordimer) The story of Rosa Burger, the daughter of white South African revolutionaries in the 1960's who are trying to fight for rights for the oppressed native people. Her parents, Lionel and Cathy Burger are both imprisoned, her mother when Rosa is just fourteen. After her mother dies in prison, her father, a talented doctor and near hero to the other radicals, eventually does as well. Rosa is not allowed to leave the country. Her entire life she has been raised around the revolutionists, their ideas and their actions. Rosa, though, doesn't want to follow in her parents' footsteps. She's wants more than anything to travel to Europe. When she's 27, she finally gets permission for a one year VISA with strict rules put in place about who she can and cannot be in contact with. She knows she will be watched. She goes to stay with her father's first wife, Katya, and lives among her Bohemian acquaintances who float in and out of Katya's house. It's a close-knit group of friends who embrace Rosa. Rosa even falls in love and has an affair, thinking she can find peace and happiness going to London with the man. One night, though, she finds herself at a meeting of several former South African revolutionaries and recognizes her childhood best friend, the son of the servant of the house...a young black boy who the Burgers treated like one of their own, and she excitedly approaches him. She hasn't seen him almost 20 years. She has no idea what he's been doing all this time. When she calls him by his childhood nickname he bristles and tells her his given African name. They end up having a long conversation where he criticizes both her idealistic view of their childhood and her father's attempts at "making things better for the black people" when they should have never been suppressed in the first place and should have been given the power to help themselves. He basically gives her a good verbal slap in the face that opens her eyes to what he and his family were really going through when they were young children. This prompts Rosa to go back to Africa and help as a nurse at a rehabilitation center for children who have been born crippled, or crippled by war, and then as it happens, more recently, injured by the shootings currently (1977) being perpetrated by police on random groups of black teenagers and children. As the country revolts, they revolt against even the white people who are trying to help them. Rosa is eventually arrested and imprisoned for conspiracy because she went to the meeting in London. The book ends off with Rosa still in prison and writing to her father's second wife, Katya. Burger's Daughter, written by Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer, was a compelling book, but written in a stream of conscious manner, even the dialogue. It was difficult at times to follow, and took me a long time to read, but I'm very glad I did. I enjoy expanding my exposure to events and countries that I've never really read about.