On the last Friday of every month, Carol at Reading Ladies Book Club hosts Captivating Characters where you can share your post about the most captivating character (real or fictional) you encountered in the past month.
This Month's Captivating Character: Sylvia Novak
Published by Atria Books on March 10, 2026
Age/Genres: Adult, Fiction
Rating:
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.
This story was about three generations of Novak women who were all gifted one do-over and the way this magical gift shaped their lives. Sylvia was a pistol! I loved this sassy grandma because she lived her life with reckless abandon and collected so much wisdom along the way. She was now in her later years, but still let her HUGE personality shine. I found her amusing but also very wise, and I could never resist a grandmother whose love language was food.
Let us know in the comments!
No comments:
Post a Comment