Once and Again
A Novel
-
- 115,00 kr
Publisher Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of In Five Years and Expiration Dates, a novel following a family of women with a singular gift: the opportunity to redo one moment in their lives
Lauren has spent a lot of her life waiting. She spent her childhood on her surfboard, waiting to catch the perfect wave. She waited a long time for her husband Leo. Now she and Leo are together waiting for those two lines on a pregnancy test that will tell Lauren she’s finally pregnant.
But many women wait for those things. Lauren has also spent her life waiting to use the gift that only the women in her family have: the opportunity, just once, to turn back time and reverse a bad decision, or a moment of catastrophic luck. When Lauren was fifteen, her mother Marcella reversed the car crash that killed Lauren’s father, and ever since then, both Marcella and Lauren have been extra cautious around Dave, and perhaps extra brittle with each other. Even though Dave is alive and healthy, and out on the Malibu waves every day.
Lauren and Leo’s marriage has been rock-steady for the three years they’ve been married, but their fertility journey is starting to wear on both of them. When Leo takes a six-week job in New York, Lauren temporarily moves back to her childhood house. She’ll spend time with her dad, spend time on the water, and try not think about the relationship with her mother she wishes she had. What Lauren doesn’t expect is to run into the love of her youth: fellow surfer Stone, back home for the first time in ten years. Since he left and broke Lauren’s heart. Now Lauren’s thinking about all the choices that have brought her to this moment in her life—and wondering if one of them should be undone.
A wise and luminous novel about mothers and daughters, the complexity of marriage, and the choices we make that come to define our lives, Once and Again is Rebecca Serle at her finest.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Rebecca Serle ponders some of life’s greatest uncertainties in this emotive story of family and identity. Carefree, bohemian Sylvia is quite different from her careful, fastidious daughter, Marcella, while Marcella’s daughter, Lauren, seeks to find a balance between the two. But all three have something in common: a magical family gift they call “the silver ticket” that enables each of them, just once in their lives, to reverse time. Serle treats this supernatural element with graceful restraint, using it to explore the very different ways these women navigate their lives and express their love. Sylvia’s history with the ticket is richly mysterious. Marcella has become even more anxious since using hers to save her husband’s life. And Lauren is struggling with infertility and a suffering marriage when she unexpectedly reconnects with her childhood sweetheart, forcing her to reconsider her future—perhaps, by changing her past. Once and Again is a resonant exploration of what it means to live with our choices.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At birth, the women of the Novak family are given a silver ticket that allows them one chance to turn back time, in this disappointing tale from Serle (In Five Years). When Lauren's mother was 15, she used hers to save Lauren's father from a deadly car crash, and her mother has worried about his ailing heart ever since, knowing she's used up her only chance to save him. Lauren, who grew up surfing with her father near their modest Malibu house, is 37 and dealing with expensive and grueling fertility treatments. While Leo, her husband of three years, spends a summer in New York City to advance his film career, Lauren visits her childhood home with her parents and grandmother. There, she takes up surfing again and rekindles a romance with an old flame, Stone. Feeling disconnected from herself and pushing Leo further away, she wonders if perhaps there is a past choice she can undo. The author introduces heavy themes of family bonds and fertility struggles, but the story is undone by clunky characterizations—especially that of Stone, who's described as "humble" and vain in the span of a paragraph—and by an ending that feels unfaithful to the plot. Serle's clever concept doesn't quite translate into magic on the page.
