What happens when you hand a man unlimited do-overs and watch him make the same mistakes with better timing?
The book begins in 1978 during a biblical rainstorm in Philadelphia. A young woman appears in the chaos, clutching something mysterious, and we file that under "suspiciously important" before the story whisks us forty years ahead to a sweaty police station in the Bahamas.
There sits Alfie, a silver-haired man who looks like he has seen too much and learned too little. A detective named Vincent LaPorta is interrogating him about a casino stunt: Alfie walked into the roulette room, called three perfect numbers in a row, and walked out two million dollars richer. LaPorta, chewing on his Life Savers, wants to know how the trick was done. Alfie insists it wasn't a trick at all. It was, he says, a "love story." Which, in Albom’s universe, is always code for "philosophical gymnastics with misty eyes at the end."
Alfie produces a notebook labeled "For the Boss, To Be Read Upon My Death," which is not what most defendants bring to an interrogation, but LaPorta's been in the Bahamas long enough to know not to argue with anyone sweating through linen. The notebook tells Alfie's entire life story, and that’s where the real game begins.
Alfie was eight when he discovered his odd gift. His missionary parents had dragged him to Kenya, where he hated the heat, the lack of TV, and the insects that treated him as an all-you-can-eat buffet. Then, in a very unusual set of circumstances, his mother tells him that some people in their family get "second chances" and that he should never use this power for selfish gain. Naturally, that became his entire career plan.
As Alfie grows, he treats life like a video game with infinite respawns. He fixes bad grades, replays baseball games, and turns humiliation into strategic rehearsal. When he fails a spelling test, he rewinds and aces it. When he knocks over chocolate milk on a pretty girl, he rewinds and knocks over her interest instead. Life becomes a loop of practice and performance, with ethics somewhere offscreen.
This double-life comes with side effects. When you can relive every mistake, shame becomes optional. He stops fearing death, pain, or public speaking. He gets to be flawless, and everyone else gets to stay fooled.
By the time he's old and coughing up mortality in the Bahamas, Alfie is more scientist than sinner, testing how much a man can redo before running out of meaning.
The detective, meanwhile, reads his notebook like a man watching a car crash in philosophical slow motion. He wants a confession; Alfie offers a sermon about fate, choice, and second chances that come with the same ending every time.
Twice is a classic Mitch Albom production, complete with sentimentality in a tailored suit. It is polished, painless, and engineered to make you feel profound without needing to think too hard.
Albom turns what could have been a metaphysical puzzle into a parable about regret, forgiveness, and the illusion of control. It is half philosophy, half greeting card, with a plot that moves like a sermon disguised as science fiction.
What works is the concept. The idea of reliving a moment and fixing it speaks to every tired soul who has ever replayed a conversation in the shower. Alfie's power is wish fulfillment for the anxious and the nostalgic, people who think their lives would improve if only they had one more try.
Albom stretches that wish until it snaps, showing that repetition does not create wisdom, only a prettier version of the same mistakes. The message is simple and cruel: a second chance is useless if you never learned from the first.
What drags it down is Albom's habit of talking like a life coach at a funeral. Every moral is polished until it squeaks. The dialogue often sounds like fortune cookies written by someone who reads too much Paulo Coelho. Yet, buried in the syrup, there are moments of genuine insight and beauty.
Every decision comes with a shadow, and even divine editing cannot remove it. Love and death remain untouchable, the two plot points no one can revise. Accept your failures, forgive yourself, and stop pretending perfection is a moral virtue.
So yes, the book is manipulative, sentimental, and occasionally preachy, but it earns its emotional paycheck. It is not what many would consider great literature, but it is lovely, interesting, fun, and it is a clever confession from a man who understands that most of us would rather revise our past than confront it.