Book Review for Once and Again by Rebecca Serle

 

Once and Again by Rebecca Serle

Published:   March 10, 2026 by Atria Books

Genres:  Contemporary Romance, Magical Realism

Taken from Goodreads:  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.

 

My Thoughts:   A unique story about turning back time.   What if you had a silver ticket that allows you to go back in time one time in your life, change an event for yourself or someone important to you?   How do you decide when to use this ticket?  What event is important enough to change?

Once and Again is a book that covers some tough subjects.   There is a love triangle, infertility, and death.  These are written carefully and with much respect, but they are still tough.  The mother daughter relationship is realistic and one that I could relate to. 

I enjoyed the book; it is not my favorite from Rebecca Serle.  Yet I am still thinking about the book and talking about it. 

Thank you Atria Books for a copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.

Add to your MUST-READ list on Goodreads

Purchase your own copy on Amazon

Meet the Author (taken from her website):  Rebecca Serle is the New York Times bestselling author of Once and Again, Expiration Dates, One Italian Summer, In Five Years, The Dinner List, and the young adult novels The Edge of Falling and When You Were Mine. Serle also developed the hit TV adaptation Famous in Love, based on her YA series of the same name. She is a graduate of USC and The New School and lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter. Find out more at RebeccaSerle.com. 

instagram | facebook