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Her countryside upbringing does not change much in any of her lives, although what she takes away from these incidents in each iteration does. The sense of deja vu continues throughout the novel for both Ursula and the reader as she relives several traumatic early experiences: the bloody death of two pet rabbits to backyard foxes, a near-drowning while on a seaside vacation, being left in the yard as an infant. In yet a third, her mother and a maid accomplish the deed. In another, the doctor who arrives just before the event is able to cut the cord strangling her tiny neck. In one incarnation, she is dead before taking her first breath. In each birth, Ursula arrives during a blizzard in 1910 in rural England. Readers know something is up right away because it seems Ursula is continually being born. After all, she lives life after life after life…In fact, the blurb teaser is: What if you could live again and again, until you got it right? That doozy of a question, however, proves quite difficult to answer. The title is clever and makes it seem that Ursula’s life cycle is endlessly on repeat. Still, and although I ultimately liked the book very much, I did think it dragged a little in a few parts and wish it had been maybe 100 pages shorter such a cut would have made the remaining vignettes crisper and more profound. The uncorrected advanced proofs we received were 500+ pages (with the slightly altered ARC cover shown here). I guess let’s first start with the obvious: it’s MAMMOTH. Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life is a tricky book to talk about since the narrative is so distinctly nonlinear. While I didn’t win us the goodies, we did get ten advance copies of Life After Life to read and review as part of an online marketing promotion by the publisher* the novel’s U.S. So, I entered a contest for my book club a few months back which would have provided snacks and prizes for my chosen novel, The Snow Child.