Life After Life (Atkinson)
Mar. 7th, 2025 10:48 pmThree people recced this to me after I posted about My Real Children, and the library had it, and then I was dragging my feet posting about it but then ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hidden_variable posted comparing My Real Children and Life After Life (post has spoilers for MRC, no spoilers for LAL) so, uh, here we are.
The idea of this book is that Ursula lives her life over and over again -- though she seems to learn a bit each time. She dies as a baby, strangled by the cord wrapped around her neck. Then she starts over, and this time (how?) the doctor comes and cuts the cord, but then she drowns as a small child. Then she starts over, and falls off the roof. And so on. Ursula doesn't remember anything exactly from iteration to iteration, but she does carry with her some kind of emotional response to her previous lives, so for example the next life after falling off the roof, she decides that going on the roof is a Very Bad idea.
I found the book fascinating as well as often rather hard to read (emotionally speaking). At some point I started flipping forward to find the next time that Ursula died so that I would know what I was signing up for in this iteration. (The life iterations do start getting longer once Ursula hits adolescence -- I guess there are more ways for small kids to die than there are ways for adults to die, although Ursula does manage to find a few.) The influenza section was particularly hard to read, because I guess it was just very likely for her to die from that, so there were a lot of lives, over and over again, where she would die from influenza, and often her siblings would too, and it just sucked a lot.
I thought about this book a lot after finishing it. I didn't get it on first reading, which frustrated me. (I'm still not sure that I get it, but at least I have thoughts on what's going on.)
( Spoilers. )
Anyway -- well -- I will say that this is a hard book to read if you have any sensitivities around child death (I don't particularly, and I still found it hard to read in that respect!) but I liked it and it definitely made me think!
hidden_variable posted comparing My Real Children and Life After Life (post has spoilers for MRC, no spoilers for LAL) so, uh, here we are.The idea of this book is that Ursula lives her life over and over again -- though she seems to learn a bit each time. She dies as a baby, strangled by the cord wrapped around her neck. Then she starts over, and this time (how?) the doctor comes and cuts the cord, but then she drowns as a small child. Then she starts over, and falls off the roof. And so on. Ursula doesn't remember anything exactly from iteration to iteration, but she does carry with her some kind of emotional response to her previous lives, so for example the next life after falling off the roof, she decides that going on the roof is a Very Bad idea.
I found the book fascinating as well as often rather hard to read (emotionally speaking). At some point I started flipping forward to find the next time that Ursula died so that I would know what I was signing up for in this iteration. (The life iterations do start getting longer once Ursula hits adolescence -- I guess there are more ways for small kids to die than there are ways for adults to die, although Ursula does manage to find a few.) The influenza section was particularly hard to read, because I guess it was just very likely for her to die from that, so there were a lot of lives, over and over again, where she would die from influenza, and often her siblings would too, and it just sucked a lot.
I thought about this book a lot after finishing it. I didn't get it on first reading, which frustrated me. (I'm still not sure that I get it, but at least I have thoughts on what's going on.)
( Spoilers. )
Anyway -- well -- I will say that this is a hard book to read if you have any sensitivities around child death (I don't particularly, and I still found it hard to read in that respect!) but I liked it and it definitely made me think!
