S. F. Prescott

Filled with love, hope, and a little magic.

Rebecca Serle is the New York Times bestselling author of 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.

Every time I pick up one of Rebecca Serle’s books it’s a rare treat. A guarantee I’ll be swept away into an alternate reality that will put me through the emotional ringer. I mean that in the best way possible. Once and Again is the third book of hers I’ve read and I love it! (In Five Years being my favorite, so far!) Set in Malibu, it follows a family in which the women are born with a rare gift: a chance to redo one moment in their lives.

As far as speculative fiction goes, Serle’s books are some of my favorites. In Once and Again, I loved the grounded setting and subtle magical element, including the way she weaves so many twists into the story’ regarding the story’s past. Her characters are complex and relatable, always pulling me into the narrative. This story gripped me from the opening pages, and there were multiple themes that resonated including infertility and health issues. Themes of love, fate, and the impact of choices are clearly expressed, rounding off with a very satisfying end to the story. The pace was perfect, and I never felt like the story lagged at all. The author’s voice is compelling, leading the reader through triggering topics in a gentle way. I was so happy with the ending of the book, and cannot recommend it more.

Synopsis:

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.