Once and Again: A Novel
New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Serle, the author behind “heartbreaking, redemptive, and authentic” (Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author) modern classic In Five Years, returns with an unforgettable tale of a family of women with an astonishing gift: the ability to redo one moment in their lives.
The women of the Novak family were each born with a gift: they can, just once, turn back time.
Lauren has known since she was fifteen that her mother Marcella saved Lauren’s father from a deadly car accident. Dave is alive and happy, and out on the Malibu waves. But ever since, Marcella, her power spent, has lived in fear of what she won’t be able to reverse. Her own mother, Sylvia, is her polar opposite: a free-spirited iconoclast with a glamorous past she only hints at. Lauren has spent her life between these two role models—and waiting for her own catastrophe to strike.
Then one summer, Lauren’s husband takes a job in New York and she moves back to Broad Beach Road, back into her childhood home on the shores of Malibu. Lauren looks forward to surfing with her dad again and perhaps repairing an unspoken fracture in her relationship with her mother. What she doesn’t expect is for the boy next to door to return home as well: Stone, Lauren’s first love, who broke her heart nearly a decade before.
As Lauren falls into familiar patterns, with her family and, more dangerously, Stone, she finds herself thinking about all the choices, large and small, that have brought her to this moment. And wondering, finally, if one of them should be undone.
The women of the Novak family were each born with a gift: they can, just once, turn back time.
Lauren has known since she was fifteen that her mother Marcella saved Lauren’s father from a deadly car accident. Dave is alive and happy, and out on the Malibu waves. But ever since, Marcella, her power spent, has lived in fear of what she won’t be able to reverse. Her own mother, Sylvia, is her polar opposite: a free-spirited iconoclast with a glamorous past she only hints at. Lauren has spent her life between these two role models—and waiting for her own catastrophe to strike.
Then one summer, Lauren’s husband takes a job in New York and she moves back to Broad Beach Road, back into her childhood home on the shores of Malibu. Lauren looks forward to surfing with her dad again and perhaps repairing an unspoken fracture in her relationship with her mother. What she doesn’t expect is for the boy next to door to return home as well: Stone, Lauren’s first love, who broke her heart nearly a decade before.
As Lauren falls into familiar patterns, with her family and, more dangerously, Stone, she finds herself thinking about all the choices, large and small, that have brought her to this moment. And wondering, finally, if one of them should be undone.
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Community Reviews
Thank you to the publisher and the author for the opportunity to read this advanced copy!
I have read ALL of Serle's books, and I believe that her particular brand of magical realism inside her fiction stories really shone in this book. I loved reading the three generations of women and their struggles to relate to one another. There were times it made me sad, but I know that it is very real in a lot of families, and I appreciated that. I also appreciated that the men in the book weren't jerks. Even as the book centered on this piece of magical realism, the relationships still felt very realistic. These are flawed people, who made decisions that irrevocably changed their lives and their families' lives - and that's very relatable even without magic.
I have read ALL of Serle's books, and I believe that her particular brand of magical realism inside her fiction stories really shone in this book. I loved reading the three generations of women and their struggles to relate to one another. There were times it made me sad, but I know that it is very real in a lot of families, and I appreciated that. I also appreciated that the men in the book weren't jerks. Even as the book centered on this piece of magical realism, the relationships still felt very realistic. These are flawed people, who made decisions that irrevocably changed their lives and their families' lives - and that's very relatable even without magic.
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