{"id":5812,"date":"2026-03-15T06:25:47","date_gmt":"2026-03-15T06:25:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=5812"},"modified":"2026-03-15T06:25:47","modified_gmt":"2026-03-15T06:25:47","slug":"once-and-again-by-rebecca-serle-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=5812","title":{"rendered":"Once and Again by Rebecca Serle"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a particular ache that comes with reading a novel that understands you better than you understand yourself. Once and Again by Rebecca Serle<\/strong> is that kind of book \u2014 a luminous, heartbreaking exploration of what it means to hold the power to undo the past and still choose to move forward. Serle, the New York Times bestselling author of Expiration Dates<\/em>, One Italian Summer<\/em>, and In Five Years<\/em>, has built her career on the delicate architecture of love and time. With this latest work, she delivers her most emotionally ambitious novel yet.<\/p>\n

The premise is deceptively simple, almost folkloric. The women of the Novak family each inherit a single do-over \u2014 a silver ticket, passed down through generations since a seven-year-old girl named Irina delivered shoes to a mysterious old woman in 1920s Odessa. One chance to turn back the clock and unmake a choice. Lauren\u2019s mother, Marcella, used hers to reverse a fatal car accident that killed Lauren\u2019s father, Dave. Now Lauren, at thirty-seven, still carries her ticket untouched, waiting for a catastrophe worthy of its spending.<\/p>\n

The Malibu That Lives Inside You<\/h2>\n

What Serle does so beautifully in Once and Again by Rebecca Serle<\/strong> is ground the fantastical in the achingly domestic. The Broad Beach house \u2014 with its peeling paint, leaking roof, and overgrown fig tree \u2014 is as much a character as any member of the Novak family. Serle writes Malibu not as a postcard but as a sensory experience: the icy Pacific that bites at your heels even in summer, the salt-and-Pond\u2019s-cream scent of grandmother Sylvia, the linguini with clams eaten as the sun descends. Every detail feels lived-in, every description earned.<\/p>\n

Lauren is not a passive protagonist waiting for magic to save her. She is an accountant who finds comfort in reliability, a woman whose body has refused to give her the family she desperately wants, and a daughter caught in the gravitational pull of a mother defined entirely by fear. When Leo, her warm and hulking husband, lands a job in New York and suggests she spend the summer at the beach house, the stage is set for a homecoming that will unravel everything.<\/p>\n

Three Women, Three Relationships with Fear<\/h2>\n

The generational architecture of this novel is its greatest structural triumph. Serle alternates Lauren\u2019s first-person narration with third-person chapters from Marcella\u2019s perspective, creating a dual portrait of mother and daughter that pulses with tension and tenderness.<\/p>\n

Marcella, having spent her silver ticket, now lives inside a fortress of anxiety \u2014 orbiting Dave like a security guard, flinching at spilled water, unable to let her husband so much as surf without cataloguing the dangers. Sylvia, the ninety-one-year-old matriarch who will never reveal what she used her own ticket for, remains the family\u2019s unapologetic life force \u2014 barefoot, wine in hand, making Mediterranean fish while cracking jokes about Kennedy.<\/p>\n

Lauren exists between these two poles, and the novel\u2019s emotional engine is her slow reckoning with which woman she is becoming. The question Serle poses is not simply whether Lauren will use her ticket, but what kind of life she will build around it \u2014 whether a safety net becomes a prison.<\/p>\n

Where First Love Meets Chosen Love<\/h2>\n

The return of Stone Morrow \u2014 Lauren\u2019s first love, the golden surfer boy who broke her heart when he left for Colorado at twenty-five \u2014 introduces a familiar romantic tension that Serle handles with unusual maturity. Their reconnection unfolds through the language they share: surfing at dawn, silence as communication, bodies that remember what words have forgotten.<\/p>\n

Yet Serle is careful never to reduce this to a simple love triangle. Stone represents something more dangerous than temptation \u2014 he represents the past as refuge. Around him, Lauren doesn\u2019t have to explain her mother\u2019s anxiety or her family\u2019s secret. He was there. He witnessed it all. And that witnessing feels, in the loneliest moments, like a kind of love that Leo, her husband, can never replicate.<\/p>\n

The sections with Leo are equally textured. Their marriage is strained not by a lack of love but by the slow erosion of infertility \u2014 the shots, the appointments, the hope that refreshes itself with cruel persistence. Serle writes their fertility journey with a rawness that feels drawn from bone:<\/p>\n

The false positive from a lingering trigger shot, celebrated and then destroyed in the aisles of a Party City
\nThe final egg retrieval that yields nothing, Leo turning his back in the corner of the recovery room
\nThe way sex becomes both obligation and rebellion, stripped of spontaneity<\/p>\n

These moments give Once and Again by Rebecca Serle<\/strong> a weight that transcends its magical premise. The fantasy is almost beside the point. The real question is whether Lauren can stop running from the life she already has.<\/p>\n

The Beautiful Cost of Spending Your Miracle<\/h2>\n

Without revealing the specifics of how the ticket is ultimately used, I will say this: Serle\u2019s handling of its deployment is both surprising and inevitable. The consequences ripple outward in ways that force Lauren into the most honest conversations of her life \u2014 with her mother, her husband, and herself.<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s final act is a masterwork of emotional convergence. Lauren must confront what it means to live without a safety net, to accept that some things \u2014 her father\u2019s aging heart, her own betrayals, the irrevocable passage of time \u2014 cannot and perhaps should not be undone. Serle writes this reckoning with sentences that land like waves:<\/p>\n

The revelation that protection and control are not the same thing
\nThat grief, fully felt, is not the enemy of joy but its companion
\nThat choosing forward \u2014 imperfect, terrifying forward \u2014 is its own kind of magic<\/p>\n

Where the Current Falters<\/h2>\n

For all its emotional depth, Once and Again by Rebecca Serle<\/strong> occasionally lingers too long in its domestic rhythms. The middle section, when Lauren is settling into the beach house routine, loses some momentum as the novel catalogues meals and beach walks with a thoroughness that, while atmospheric, can slow the narrative pulse. Readers eager for the central dilemma to sharpen may find themselves waiting for the plot to catch up with the prose.<\/p>\n

Additionally, while Marcella\u2019s third-person chapters provide essential context, they sometimes feel more expository than experiential. We are told about Marcella\u2019s interior life in ways that don\u2019t always achieve the visceral intimacy of Lauren\u2019s narration. The mother-daughter relationship<\/a>, though central, could have been served by more scenes of direct confrontation earlier in the novel rather than the careful circling that dominates their dynamic until the final act.<\/p>\n

Stone, too, remains somewhat opaque. Serle paints him in gorgeous sensory detail \u2014 the dimples, the salt-crusted hair, the smell of wax and gasoline \u2014 but his emotional interiority is glimpsed rather than explored. He functions more as a mirror for Lauren\u2019s nostalgia than as a fully autonomous character.<\/p>\n

Who Should Dive In<\/h2>\n

This novel will resonate most deeply with readers who love stories about family inheritance \u2014 not of wealth, but of fear. Fans of Serle\u2019s previous work will find her signature blend of magical realism and emotional precision, though the scope here is broader and the stakes more grounded in mortality than romance.<\/p>\n

Similar Books to Explore<\/h5>\n

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue<\/em><\/a> by V.E. Schwab \u2014 for its meditation on time, memory, and the cost of immortality
\nThe Midnight Library<\/em><\/a> by Matt Haig \u2014 another exploration of alternate lives and the roads not taken
\nMalibu Rising<\/em><\/a> by Taylor Jenkins Reid \u2014 for its sun-soaked family saga and coastal atmosphere
\nThe Time Traveler\u2019s Wife<\/em> by Audrey Niffenegger \u2014 for love stories shaped by temporal displacement
\nTomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow<\/em><\/a> by Gabrielle Zevin \u2014 for its examination of partnership across decades
\nOne Italian Summer<\/em> by Rebecca Serle \u2014 for readers who want more of Serle\u2019s magical realism<\/p>\n

Final Verdict: A Novel That Trusts the Tide<\/h2>\n

Once and Again by Rebecca Serle<\/strong> is, at its heart, a book about the terrifying beauty of forward motion. It asks what happens when the women who can rewrite history choose, instead, to live with it. Serle has written a novel that tastes like salt water and reads like a prayer \u2014 imperfect in places, yes, but profoundly alive. The magic here is not in the silver ticket. It is in the staying.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a particular ache that comes with reading a novel that understands you better than you understand yourself. Once and Again by Rebecca Serle is that kind of book \u2014 a luminous, heartbreaking exploration of what it means to hold the power to undo the past and still choose to move forward. Serle, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5450,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5812"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}