Response to The Dinner List by Rebecca Serle

8/10

Dear Readers, 

Have you ever wanted to have dinner with your list? You know, your list of people, dead or alive, who’d you invite to dinner. Well Sabrina gets that chance. Audrey Hepburn, her ex boyfriend, her old college professor, her father (who abandoned her), and her best friend. 

Jessica is probably the most interesting character of all, because she starts off as this left wing heart on her sleeve type of girl, but grows to someone more conservative as she grows up. The reason this makes her interesting is because both halves of her personality are big catalysts for Sabrina’s big decisions. I also love her ideals as she’s younger, much more hippie like. Sabrina even talks about one of Jessica’s theories, “There are flowers and there are gardeners. Flowers bloom; gardeners tend. Two flowers, no tending. Everything dies,” (Serle, pg 64). I can see the truth in this theory, and it applies so accurately to Tobias and Sabrina. Sabrina wanted Tobias to be happy with her, and Tobias wanted to be successful. While he relied on Sabrina, she had so much resentment towards him. 

I also loved the complexity in the relationship between Sabrina and Robert, her father. At the dinner, Sabrina asks him various questions about the short time they spent together, and about the years he spent sober after leaving her and her mother. It was hard, on one hand I felt for Sabrina, to know her father got sober for someone else but couldn’t for her. On the other, I understand Robert was human and made mistakes just like anyone else. Nobody’s perfect, and he had many regrets, but he was trying to do better. 

There are parts of the story that fall flat, for one, I don’t like the duel timeline. We see both the dinner party and the course of Tobias and Sabrina’s relationship. I feel we focused too much on the past, and not on the dinner. I’m not saying there shouldn't be a duel timeline, but there should be more focus on the actual dinner. That was the whole bite of the book, that we’d be having dinner with all these people, but we barely spent time at the dinner. 

-Grace Sofia