Life After Life??

"What if you could live your life over and over again until you got it right?" 

Named the Best Book of 2013 by Time Magazine. 

*Review contains spoilers

The Butterfly Effect meets Jane Austen!

I honestly don't even know what to say about this book, except that it was one of the most confusing books I have ever read. Sadly, I'm not sure if it was confusing because my brain could not wrap itself around the concept or it's just a genuinely confusing piece of fiction.

Life After Life follows a woman named Ursela as she relives her life over and over again. Each time something a little different happens.Circumstances change, people change, people die, people don't die. It's a mixture of different life outcomes all shrouded by WWII.

Now, Life After Life  is a pretty lengthly book and it took me about 200 pages to grasp even the slightest bit of what was going on. On one page Ursula is drowning in the ocean and things go dark. Then on the next  page she is getting saved by some guy who was paining at the beach. This sort of thing happens numerous times. I started to think, maybe she isn't dying? But then there is a scene where she clearly jumps out of a window...and dies. The next thing you know she didn't jump out of the window, she "hesitated", the book claims. Confusing!!! When I finally did catch on to the way her life was working, things changed again. As confusing as the book was, I really did appreciate one scene that caused a 200 page chain reaction. On Ursela's 16th birthday, she gets her first kiss. This single kiss leads to her rape, an abortion, and marrying a man who tries to kill her. Two-hundred pages later, we revisit that same 16th birthday scene and she does not allow that kiss to happen, therefore  she is not subjected to rape and doesn't end up with her crazy abusive husband. She is able to go back to school and live a happier life. Granted, we return to that 16th birthday scene multiple times and she still dies in the end, but it goes to show you the power of how changing one little detail can affect your entire life. Sadly for us, we only get to live our lives once. 

Even though I could appreciate some chain reactions, I really didn't appreciate how we never find out why or how this whole weird circumstance is taking place. Ursula goes to a psychiatrist who tells her about reincarnation but as we all know, in reincarnation people come back as different things or different people. In Ursula's case she always comes back as herself, with the same social circumstances, while only certain events are changing. So this could be a twisted form of reincarnation which in that case Kate Atkinson is one clever bitch! I just wish I knew more as to why this was happening. Was Ursula born with some kind of birth defect that causes her to repeat her life over and over again until she gets it right? But that also makes you think, how do we ever know when it's "right?"

S.