Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

If Teddy ever cried when he was younger, Ursula could never bear it. It seemed to open up a chasm inside, something deep and dreadful ad full of sorrow. All she ever wanted was to make sure he never felt like crying again. The man in Dr Keller's waiting room had the same effect on her ('That's how motherhood feels every day,' Sylvie said).

Ursula, the heroine of Life After Life, dies three times in the first fifteen pages of this novel. She is destined to live the same life over and over again, each time taking a slightly divergent path. In some ways this is like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, with all the pathways delineated one after the other--the literary equivalent of those "Path to Victory" infographics. The first death gives us a hint at where all those paths may be leading: she dies shooting a young Adolph Hitler in a Berlin tavern before he has a chance to unleash chaos on Europe. Then we flashback to the beginning: she dies at birth, then as a toddler, then as young girl. As Ursula lives longer, she seems to carry vestigial memories of her past lives, and slowly builds up to her final purpose.

Atkinson artfully weaves these lives into a coherent whole. This could easily have been a very choppy, very disorienting novel, but Atkinson is able to ease the reader through the transitions using common moments and language as anchors. We relive some of the days seven or eight times, but each is a little (or drastically) different, and Atkinson builds suspense beautifully by layering these experiences over each other.

Ursula's lives are uncommonly violent. I was taken aback and how difficult it was to process the death of a child, and the shock didn't ever really wear off. Even the moments in between death are violent--Ursula is the victim of rape and assault; she works as a rescue volunteer in London during the WWII bombings; she endures the deaths of brothers, friends, partners. The revolving door of death and devastation is virtually constant. Perhaps because of this, I had trouble sticking with this one the whole way through. I put it down and picked it back up three separate times, and while I enjoyed it and ended up finishing it, it took me much longer than normal to read.