The Seven Year Slip

The concept of The Seven Year Slip is a strong sell - a woman grieving the loss of her aunt moves into her aunt's apartment and finds that this apartment sometimes sends you back 7 years in the past. There, Clementine meets Iwan, a man who stayed a summer at her aunt's house with dreams of making it as a chef. 

The plot centers around her falling in love with the idealistic Iwan of the past while getting to know the more cynical and refined Iwan of the present. I had a hard time connecting to the romance between Clementine and young Iwan. The conversations felt like they skipped straight into the deep end without any getting-to-know-you phase, and I didn't find them believable. I felt much more connected to the more mature romance with present-day Iwan. That's not to say past Iwan wasn't likable, he had a lovely way with words.“Universal truths in butter. Secrets folded into the dough. Poetry in the spices. Romance in a chocolate. Love in a lemon pie.”The main point of this story which I deeply connected to was the concept of falling in love with multiple versions of your partner and accepting that people change. The person you loved seven years ago will be vastly different from the person you love today, even if they are the same person. No one ever goes back to being the old version of themselves, and you cannot force them to. Long-lasting love means choosing to fall in love over and over again with every new version. As someone who has been married for almost a decade now, that clicked with me.“That was love, wasn't it? It wasn't just a quick drop – it was falling, over and over again, for your person. It was falling as they became new people. It was learning how to exist with every new breath. It was uncertain and it was undeniably hard, and it wasn't something you could plan for.”