Life After Life (Todd Family, #1) in Reading with Style

Mar 13, 2013 Connie G rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy, historical-fiction, england

Ursula Todd died repeatly, and each time she starts life over again in February 1910 as the third child in the Todd family in Buckinghamshire. During each new life she has a sixth sense about the future, with the sense of "deja vu" getting stronger as she goes through more lives. She compares it to a palimpsest, an overwritten manuscript. Small changes in her actions change the course of both her personal history and the lives of close family and friends.

The book was a combination of fantasy and ...more

9 likes · Like · see review

Jan 12, 2014 Thomas Acland rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010-s, historical-fiction, 21st-century, war, fantasy, set-in-the-uk, set-in-germany, magical-realism, wwii-fiction

Firstly and most importantly I have to say that I really enjoyed reading this book. Having only previously read Kate Atkinson's detective mystery series featuring Jackson Broodie prior to reading this novel I had firmly placed Kate Atkinson as a good but not particularly memorable crime writer. Obviously I was aware that she had written other novels out of this genre in the past but this was the first such novel that I have read.

The main concept of the book is the continual rebirth of the lead Firstly and most importantly I have to say that I really enjoyed reading this book. Having only previously read Kate Atkinson's detective mystery series featuring Jackson Broodie prior to reading this novel I had firmly placed Kate Atkinson as a good but not particularly memorable crime writer. Obviously I was aware that she had written other novels out of this genre in the past but this was the first such novel that I have read.

The main concept of the book is the continual rebirth of the lead character, Ursula. Every time she dies (and she is unnaturally unlucky in this aspect) she returns to a past point of her life and gets the chance to walk down a slightly different path which may or may not completely change her entire future. There are some consistencies between each life but also some massive differences, in it's own way this book is the perfect illustration of chaos theory in action, in that the smallest of changes can completely reshape the world.

I'm not necessarily going to say that these theories are true, I'm not convinced that if I chose to wear a different pair of shoes tomorrow morning it would make the slightest difference to the world in 20 years time, but then again I guess I'll never know because whichever decision is made I'm only going to know what happens from there.

To an extend this book does and doesn't feel like time travel, I've seen it placed as time travel on a number of goodreads shelves but I don't really think that it is, to me it is more of a series of alternate realities each occurring simultaneously in their own separate ways.

Anyway I digress into a rather philosophical debate about the meaning of the book which to be honest is somewhere that I am usually proved to be completely barking up the wrong tree. Back to the actual books it's self, I've already mentioned it's originality which is something that I loved and is probably going to be the one thing that I really remember about the book. But aside from this it is well written, on occasion during the war period the author became a bit overenthusiatic with the use of acronyms which I didn't always immediately get, but other than that I really liked the writing style.

It could get a bit long and drawn out in places but in my opinion was never overly slow and even the bits that you found slow when you initially read them usually turned out to be much more important and necessary at some later point when the scene was (or was close to) being revisited.

All in all a good book really worth a read, a bit slow through the middle but very lively at the start which gets you drawn in and with a really 'nice' ending. ...more

1 like · Like · see review