Life After Life (Kate Atkinson)

Kate Atkinson, possible most famous for her Jackson Brodie mysteries has just written a stand alone novel depicting the subject of reincarnation. Our main character, Ursula Todd is a child born in 1910 but in one scene she has suffocated from the umbilical cord. In another scene she lives. This story is the cliche onion, masterfully layered at which we see Ursula through several lives. She doesn't know that she's died previously just to be reborn under the same circumstance but with perhaps the most tiniest of inklings of having lived before and maybe making a different decision or avoiding a shady character or warning others of impending doom. We learn a lot of the wars and her siblings and her mother, a pessimistic woman who plays favorites with her children and of her father who's a great dad. At first the books focus's much on the mother, Sylvia and her dealings with having young children and then of Ursula's early years over and over again and then about half way through we learn a lot about the war, specifically about Hitler and Eva. Overall a very intriguing concept for a book. Atkinson is informative, witty, smart and bold. To me it lagged a little in the middle with all the war stuff and the intro to a few characters that didn't seem to have any real impact on the overall story but definitely worth the read.