Author: Rebecca Serle

Publisher: Atria Books 

ISBN: 9781668025918

A woman with a unique gift finds herself facing a life-changing decision, literally. As she wrestles with what to do and memories of the past, she must also contend with her responsibility to her family and what it means to put herself first. 

Author Rebecca Serle returns with a plot that tries too hard to do and be everything all at once and ultimately doesn’t succeed in nearly any of those endeavors in her newest novel Once and Again.

California born and bred, Lauren has always known about the secret she shares with her mother and maternal grandmother: they’ve each had access to a silver ticket that allows them to undo a single situation in life. Lauren’s mother, Marcella, used hers to turn back the clock when Lauren’s father, Dave, got into a fatal car crash. Dave doesn’t remember anything about the accident; instead, he spends his days surfing the waves in Malibu and doting on Lauren.

Lauren’s grandmother, Sylvia, has never revealed what she used her ticket for, no matter how many times Lauren has asked about it. Lauren herself still has her ticket. Despite having her heart broken by boy-next-door Stone after a romance that lasted a decade, Lauren still hasn’t run across a situation that she believes drastic enough to use the ticket. She wants to save it for when she really needs it.

In the meantime, Lauren and her husband, Leo, are trying to have a baby. The struggles with infertility have challenged their marriage in ways they never thought possible. Leo says he’s happy for their family to be the two of them, but Lauren is becoming more desperate for a child of her own. When Leo, who works in television, gets a job in New York City for the summer, the two decide the break might do them some good. Their marriage isn’t in peril, not yet, and they recognize that to keep it that way some absence might be in order.

The couple turn the house into a short-term rental for extra cash, and Lauren moves back in with her parents for the summer. Then she runs into Stone, and everything about their time together for all those years comes rushing back. Before she knows it, Lauren is putting herself into emotionally charged waters. Unlike Leo, who has never had much love for surfing, Lauren grew up on a board. For 10 years, she and Stone surfed together. Now they can do so again.

Then Lauren finds herself in the most compromising position of her entire adult life, and she wants to undo everything. Knowing she has the capacity to accomplish that means it’ll be like it never happened. Except using her ticket creates other complications that she could never have imagined. Now Lauren, Marcella, Sylvia, and Dave will all have to grapple with what Lauren did and decide what family really means.

Author Rebecca Serle creates characters who are fairly well-rounded, but the rest of the book leaves enough room for questions that readers may find themselves yanked out of the story more than once by asking them. The most obvious might be why Lauren doesn’t use her ticket to solve some of the infertility issues she and Leo are facing. A major plot twist related to that story problem dropped in the last few pages of the book may leave readers scratching their heads. If that solution was an option, why wasn’t it considered or proposed before?

It’s fairly obvious where Lauren and Stone are headed from the moment he appears on the page, and the predictability is disappointing. It feels engineered for another plot twist that creates opportunities for conversations between the women of the family. The narration also bounces from Lauren in the first person to an unnamed, unknown third person narrator to Sylvia much later in the book. The effect is jarring at times; Lauren’s voice is so clearly developed that readers may wonder in the first few third-person chapters whether she’s the one telling the story. 

The magical realism element of the silver tickets feels more like an afterthought and, again, a convenient plot device that actually complicates the story unnecessarily. Diehard fans of Rebecca Serle who are used to her storytelling style and story choices will probably enjoy this one. Other readers may want to pick up other romance or women’s fiction books instead. I say Once and Again by Rebecca Serle Borders on bypassing it.