Publisher: Atria Books, March10, 2026

Format: ebook

Pages: 256

Rating: 3.5/5 stars

Summary (From Goodreads):

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.

My Review:

Thank you Atria Books for the copy of this book.
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Read if you like: magical realism, family sagas
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Lauren’s family is special in that when they are born, they get a silver ticket with the opportunity to redo one moment in their life. When Lauren’s husband is away from work in the summer, she spends the summer at her family’s beach house, where she starts to question the choices she has made in life.
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Overall, the writing was beautiful and well done. I always love Serle’s writing, but I struggled with this story. I didn’t like how Lauren spent her ticket, and she didn’t have many redeeming qualities in the end. I liked the premise of this story, but was left feeling unsatisfied.