Christian Chapters: The Fifth Avenue Story Society by Rachel Hauck

Five Lonely New Yorkers Find Community and Hope Through Shared Personal Stories.

The Fifth Avenue Story Society
by Rachel Hauck

Publication Date: February 4, 2020
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Length: 400pp
ISBN-13: 978-0785216674

Related Links:
Rachel Hauck’s Website

Publisher Synopsis

An invitation to join The Fifth Avenue Story Society gives five New York strangers a chance to rewrite their own stories.

Executive assistant Lexa is eager for a much-deserved promotion, but her boss is determined to keep her underemployed.

Literature professor Jett is dealing with a broken heart, as well as a nagging suspicion his literary idol, Gordon Phipps Roth, might be a fraud.

Uber driver Chuck just wants a second chance with his kids.

Aging widower Ed is eager to write the true story of his incredible marriage.

Coral, queen of the cosmetics industry, has broken her engagement and is on the verge of losing her great grandmother’s multimillion-dollar empire.

When all five New Yorkers receive an anonymous, mysterious invitation to the Fifth Avenue Story Society, they suspect they’re victims of a practical joke. No one knows who sent the invitations or why. No one has heard of the literary society. And no one is prepared to reveal their deepest secrets to a roomful of strangers.

Yet curiosity and bring them back week after week to the old library. And it’s there they discover the stories of their hearts, and the kind of friendship and love that heals their souls.

My Review

Precious. Timeless. Capsules of life and history. But the Fifth Avenue Literary Society Library was not about closed books. It was about open lives.

When we meet Jett at the opening of The Fifth Avenue Story Society, the New York literature professor is in jail. He had too much to drink at a friend’s wedding reception (he has issues with weddings which we’ll learn about) and stepped in to defend a bridesmaid from unwanted advances from a groomsman. He spends the night in jail with a man named Chuck, who also stepped into the fight. The two don’t exactly become friends that night, but their lives again intersect when they both receive a mysterious anonymous invitation to The Fifth Avenue Story Society.

At the first Society meeting, Jett and Uber/limo driver Chuck come face to face with a widower named Ed, cosmestics CEO and high-society woman Coral, and Jett’s ex-wife, Lexa who is consumed by her job and her ambition. Though no one knows why they’ve been invited or by whom, the group decides to continue meeting on Monday nights over a shared meal. The very different group of individuals share enough of their lives that they begin to have genuine relationship.

Ultimately, The Fifth Avenue Story Society is a tale of community and trust. It’s about healing from past hurts by having the courage and faith to walk through the pain with honesty. The characters find and forge connections with each other but each also learns about himself/herself and finds a second chance at happiness.

I enjoyed watching these people from different walks of life and different life experiences interact and begin to care about one another. The novel does a good job of showing the characters’ progressions as they learn to be vulnerable and share their difficult stories and life secrets with one another. I liked that there was a decent amount of complexity to their lives and their identities, each being uniquely believeable.

One of the characters has a story of coming to faith. I appreciated that although this is a Christian novel, for the majority of the work only one of the characters really discusses faith. It took some suspension of disbelief to buy into these disparate New Yorkers being willing to keep meeting with one another, so I liked that believability wasn’t further stretched by making them all Christians. However (*spoiler warning*), by the novel’s end, all five have begun to reach out to God and advance in their own faith journeys. I found this kind of ending a bit too pat and happily-ever-after. Still, the novel was a pleasure to read and is well-suited for TV film adaptation (think Hallmark Channel).

— Dawn Teresa