CBR10Bingo: This Is The End (BINGO!) Have you ever read a book that you hated to put down but also hated to keep reading because you couldn’t bear the thought of reaching the end? That’s how I felt reading Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins, the companion to her brilliant Life After Life. Unlike Ursula in Life After Life, her younger brother Teddy only gets one shot at life. He still becomes a bomber pilot during World War II, still gets shot down over Germany, […]
Now This is Literature or a Defense of Kindness
It’s been such a long time since I read Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life that I realized a few chapters in that I was slightly confusing certain aspects about the family with Kate Morton’s novel The Lake House. Mostly just birthing order and Teddy’s age – I thought he was the youngest and conceived after his father’s return from World War I when he was actually born in 1914 and not the last sibling. However, I definitely remembered that he was Ursula’s favorite sibling, his […]
When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.
I don’t want to tell you what this book does, as a piece of fiction, but I will tell you what it’s about. This is a kind of sequel, kind of companion piece to the other Kate Atkinson novel Life after Life, which I listened on a long hike. At first in that one it was frustrating to keep up with the premise, which involves the same character starting and restarting life as she keeps hitting the same fatal snags, and sort of nudging her choices […]