Kate Atkinson published a new book this year, A God in Ruins. The world was raving about it, and about her earlier works, and I was embarrassed that I hadn’t heard of her. I got curious, did a little research, and found somewhere that Atkinson is one of Stephen King’s favorite authors. He particularly recommended the Jackson Brodie books. I decided I wanted to read all of her books, and figured I’d best start with the first one. Case one: a little girl goes missing […]
In the Face of the Abyss, Hold On To Kindness
I have to say I’m a bit in awe of Kate Atkinson’s writing prowess. This novel sucked me in, gave me a dose of existential angst, made me laugh, and then made me cry. Atkinson plays a lot with form here, just as she did in Life after Life, but it works because the characters are just so wonderfully and frustratingly real. In Life after Life, Atkinson tells the story of Ursula Todd who dies and is reborn numerous times in the novel as she […]
Fascinating premise, boring execution
How strange to spend a whole novel waiting for the main character to die again… Every time Ursula Todd dies, “darkness falls” and she starts all over again, at her birth. She has vague memories of her previous lives, and is able to use these to avoid making the same mistakes again (for instance, although it takes a few tries, she saves her family from a flu epidemic that would have otherwise killed them all). It’s a really neat idea, but the novel itself varies from depressing […]
This would have been better as just one case history.
Three unsolved and unrelated cases are introduced in the first three chapters of the book. Jackson Brodie, our detective protagonist who, of course, has ex-wife issues and a precocious daughter, goes about solving each of these cases, which slowly are revealed to be connected. This book starts out really well. Atkinson has a real gift for characterization, especially when she describes loss, grief, and frustration–and after the third chapter I was hooked, and curious to see where she’d go from that great set-up. There were […]
“Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.”
Life After Life has been on my radar for over a year. It sounded intriguing – what would happen if you lived your life over and over again, and how would minute changes in your choices and actions affect that life? I was intrigued, but not drawn in. My mom read it with her book club late last year and her reaction to the work was “it was different. Not bad, but definitely different.” With that less than stellar review I pushed it further down […]
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