Why You'll Love This
Three generations of women each get one chance to rewind time — and the real tension is whether any of them should use it.
- Great if you want: quiet magical realism woven into family drama and loss
- The experience: intimate and melancholic — more meditation than momentum
- The writing: Serle writes in close emotional proximity, spare and achingly interior
- Skip if: you want the magic system explored — it stays deliberately thin
About This Book
What would you do if you could rewind time—but only once, and only for someone else? In Rebecca Serle's Once and Again, the women of the Novak family each carry that singular, irreversible power, and the weight of it shapes everything: the choices they make, the fears they carry, and the lives they half-live in anticipation of disaster. Lauren has watched her mother sacrifice her gift to save Lauren's father and retreat into quiet terror ever since. Now, returning to her childhood home on the Malibu coast with her own marriage quietly unraveling, Lauren must reckon with what it means to love someone when you know exactly how much you stand to lose.
Serle writes with the kind of controlled intimacy that makes small moments feel charged with consequence. The magical conceit here isn't flashy—it's almost offhand, woven into the texture of ordinary life in a way that quietly reframes everything around it. The novel's real architecture is emotional: three generations of women, three different relationships to risk and surrender, all pressing against each other in close, sun-drenched quarters. It's a tight, propulsive read that trusts its readers to feel the stakes without having them spelled out.
