I picked up Life After Life by Kate Atkinson despite some trepidation about the Groundhog Day premise but was ultimately impressed. When I started seeing A God in Ruins (2015) on bookshelves, I was eager to read another book by Atkinson. However, I was yet again put off by the premise. I was surprised that Atkinson chose to write about the Todd family, the same family that she’d focused on in her previous book. Specifically, she focuses on Teddy, Ursula’s younger brother and a pilot in the […]
The First Jackson Brodie story
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 […]