Expiration Dates – 4/5 ✩
Expiration Dates, Rebecca Serle’s latest novel, is a novel about love and what it means for each one of us. In the book, each time Daphne Bell begins seeing a new man, she receives a slip of paper that tells her exactly how long she will be with that man for. She spends her life in romantic entanglements, never surprised when a romance fizzles and never too hurt when it ends. For years, she’s been waiting for the day that she receives a paper without an expiration date, and as the novel opens, she finally receives that paper with just a single name on it, Jake.
As the novel progresses, Daphne recounts her old flames, including her sweeping romance with Hugo, her now best friend, and as she journeys through her new relationship with Jake, we learn that there’s more to her than just a woman who is looking for love.
We begin to understand why she keeps men at a distance, even though she doesn’t see in the moment that she’s doing it. We watch her grow from someone who is a self-admitted commitmentphobe to someone who is ready to open herself up, truly open herself up, to someone else.
This novel was beautifully written. We spend some chapters in the present day, then we flashback to anecdotes of Daphne’s past loves, and then forward again to the present day. At times, it felt there was no rhyme or reason to the order in which these stories were told, but their chronology built up beautifully once we got to one particular story: Daphne’s and Tae’s.
If you plan to read Expiration Dates, I’d suggest coming back to this review after you finish the book. The rest contains big spoilers ☺
Daphne has spent her life keeping the men she dates at arm’s length, never fully letting anyone in, and as a reader, you assume it’s because she knows each relationship is finite. You assume that she grasps for the piece of paper without an end date because she so desperately wants to know that she’s found the person she’s going to spend the rest of her life with.
In reality, Daphne has congenital heart disease, and while a paper without an end date could mean that she’s found her life partner, it could also mean that this is her last relationship because she won’t live to commit to another.
In the past, only two of her partners have known about her condition: Tae, whom she was dating at the time of her diagnosis, and Hugo, whom Daphne begrudgingly told and promptly broke up with after.
Once readers find out about her condition, her actions begin to make sense; why she is so hesitant to fully open up to Jake, who lost his wife several years earlier, and why each anecdote about her previous partners is so crucial in the build up to the person she is now.
Something else that I found so special about this book was the different types of love felt in this book. There was passionate love, innocent love, easy love, a feeling of forbidden love, and Daphne’s awareness of this was so raw and special to me.
While she didn’t always know what she wanted and didn’t always know how to go about getting what she wanted, Daphne had a unique way of looking at love which I so enjoyed being a part of.
I also loved the looming sense of an impending love triangle.
Jake is perfect for Daphne. He is kind, he is straightforward, he knows how to communicate, he treats Daphne with nothing but love and respect, yet, to me, it felt like there was something lacking in their relationship.
It isn’t that I was searching for conflict, but Jake was SO perfect that their relationship felt a bit…flat. It almost felt to me that he was so perfect that their relationship was going to be left with nothing in the end; there would always be a desire for more.
Meanwhile, Hugo was on the sidelines, clearly (and not so clearly at other times), still in love with Daphne. Although their relationship was strictly platonic in the present day, there were moments that were so charged between Daphne and Hugo that I was itching to see them get back together, even though Daphne’s papers made it clear their time was done and she was happily committed to Jake.
To me, Jake felt like the person you SHOULD pick – he was, by definition, the Right Choice. Whereas Hugo was the person you shouldn’t pick, but you WANT to pick.
Would Daphne live a happy life with Jake? Absolutely. But here’s the thing: she would’ve been living a life where she was happy enough, but not necessarily happy.
At the end of the novel, Daphne does stand up for herself: she breaks off her engagement with Jake, she spends some time abroad, and when she comes back, she has a date with an anonymous man. When she arrives at the meeting place, the slip of paper with what can only be assumed to have been the expiration date on her relationship with the man she’s meeting, slips away from her and she doesn’t reach for it, effectively ending the hold these slips of paper have over her. Then, she sits down for coffee with Hugo.
I love this ending, I love that we’re led to believe she ends up with Hugo, but I will be completely honest when I say I wanted more.
Although this is a book about love, I do think the driving force behind it is character development. With that being said, the novel ends perfectly.
As someone who devours romance novels though, I definitely would have liked to see more of the rekindled romance between Hugo and Daphne.
Something else I think is special about Serle’s novels is the incorporation of magical realism in all(?) of her novels. I have read three of her other novels (One Italian Summer, In Five Years, and The Dinner List), each of which also included elements of magical realism.
Her novels are always realistic, but they mix in such unique elements, seemingly with no explanation at all. It’s not something I think I would ever be able to conjure up in my own brain if I were writing a novel, but Serle has such a gift at weaving these magical and realistic elements together.
She also is incredible at setting the scene. The specificity of setting in this novel was incredible; I felt like I was in each of these places with the characters, even though I haven’t been to every one of the places they went. I’ve felt this way with her other novels as well, especially One Italian Summer.
Lastly, one of my favorite things about reading is being able to identify and isolate quotes that hold profound meaning both inside the passage in which they lie and also carry that weight once isolated as well.
Here are some of my favorite quotes from Expiration Dates:
- “It’s hard to hold on to people the older we get. Life looks different for everyone, and you have to keep choosing one another. You have to make a conscious effort to say, over and over again, “You.” Not everyone makes that choice. Not everyone can.” (Page 120-121)
- “But I have no memory of an aha moment, no recollection of any specific revelation. When do we stop believing in the things we do? And why does it happen so slowly instead of all at once?” (Page 127)
- “We have to be cracked open sometimes. We have to be cracked open sometimes to let anything good in. What I see now, emerging in the mirror, is this one, simple truth: learning to be broken is learning to be whole.” (Page 231)
- “Being surprised by life isn’t losing, it’s living. It’s messy and uncomfortable and complicated and beautiful. It’s life, all of it. The only way to get it wrong is to refuse to play.” (Page 238)
Anchored Musings 