Title: The Five Year Lie
Author: Cheryl-Ann Hooper
Publisher: Europe Books
Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Chick lit
First Publication: 2022
Language: English
Book Summary: The Five Year Lie by Cheryl-Ann Hooper
Four friends, five years, one decision. Sometimes, the people who know you best are those who let you down the most.
New Year’s Eve – the day that marks the end of one year and the beginning of another is the fateful moment when best friends, Rachel, Carrie, Jenna, and Hattie find their lives change forever. As the year goes on, the discovery of a five-year long secret is uncovered. And, when the skeletons eventually come out, they begin to wonder if they were ever really friends in the first place. A page-turning novel about friendship, marriage, and secrets that keeps you guessing to the end.
Book Review: The Five Year Lie by Cheryl-Ann Hooper
Friendship is a million little moments, but can it survive one secret? In The Five Year Lie, Cheryl-Ann Hooper tells a tale of four best friends, Rachel, Carrie, Jenna, and Hattie, and how their lives change after discovering a five-year-old secret. It is a heartfelt story of how long-held secrets can catch up with even the best of friends.
The narrative shifts its focus among the four best friends from the time they were in college to the present day, when they are all in their middle years. This story was a good example of how regrets and secrets can hold you back in life. I loved how, rather than just condensing the story and following the friends into their twenties, we got to see them for a huge chunk of their lives. I became frustrated with some of the characters at times, but not because I found them annoying; rather, I wished they would make better decisions.
The Five Year Lie by Cheryl-Ann Hooper was a great read and will resonate with many. I think we all have those friends that we thought would always be part of our lives, but we don’t see much of them any more. Author Cheryl-Ann Hooper has crafted an engaging story full of friendship, secrets, and finding out who you really are. This story is about forgiveness, trying to get past terrible secrets and hurts and deciding what is best for the future.
All the characters in this book are fully-developed and feel so real that you get attached to them and keep turning pages to find out what happens next. I liked the way Cheryl chose to tell the story over a long period of time. This is life, and every friendship, every relationship develops in time. The author does a great job with the build-up of this painful secret as you learn early on what happened, but as the years pass, you wonder if healing is an option as so many lives are affected.
Author Cheryl-Ann Hooper has an engaging writing style that kept me completely invested in the story throughout. She delivers a compelling, intriguing, thought-provoking, and well-written tale that totally captivated and immersed me in the storyline. The characters were likeable and relatable to a point where I thought that I alone was the intended audience.
To me, the biggest message from The Five Year Lie is that it’s never too late to reconnect with an old friend or to mend a relationship that’s been broken. It’s also a story of how we evolve over time with all those tiny choices we make along the way, and how those evolution may make us forget our dreams or even who we thought we were. I can highly recommend this great book to anybody who has wondered about the importance our friends have in our lives; about the reasons we drifted apart with some of our friends; about choices we made in life and how they played out; and anybody who believes in forgiveness and second chances.
