Life After Life by Kate Akinson

This book isn't as good as I expected it to be mainly because I took a sneak peak of a few page of the author note at the back when I was half way of the book. So I kinda had an idea of what’s going to happen. Ops, my bad.

Ursula has many chances to live, or should I say, relive. She faces death so many times. Because of that, everything seems to be familiar to her. Is it déjà vu or reincarnation? 

It's a well written book, indeed. The structure of the book takes readers backward and forward non-chronologically, but with a clear direction, showing the re-dos of not only Ursula's lives, but also others’. When a thing changes, another does, too. Everything is correlated. And that, the flow of the story plot becomes very unexpected. Every little timeframe adds up, yet takes us to different directions. However, it does get me wonder of where the restarts are, or when the darkness falls is the start of everything? I guess that's for readers to explore.

 'What if we had a chance to do it again and again, until you finally got it right?' Teddy said. 

How do we know it's ever 'right'? When the world is at peace and no one is harm, under the definition of human or the government? What is even 'right'?  

Yes – a tiny change will lead to a whole different story but I believe sometimes things happen for a reason and that's just how life is. No matter how hard we try to have things under control, they might not turn out the way we wish them to be. And once things happen, there's no turning back to re-do; that's what makes it life. Let's not forget, though, we only wish to change things after they happened, when we know how things ended. If we were able to re-do things, there wouldn't be history, and there would be no past. And we'll no longer have now. That leads to a further discussion on time – the past is now, the now is the future. 

When Dr. Kellet asks young Ursula to draw something, she draws a snake with its tail in its mouth. 'It’s a symbol representing the circularity of the universe,' the doctor explains. 'Time is a construct, in reality everything flows, no past or present, only the now.' 

After all, maybe we do have a way to make things right – now.