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A review by wretchedtheo
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
Did not finish book. Stopped at 37%.
I feel a bit bad for DNF-ing this one, because I actually quite liked the style and the concept. There's the sense that it could have been a quality read, except the book seems SO. MUCH. LONGER than it needs to be.
I'm usually very good with long and slow-paced books. It's just that, in the case of Life after life, there is practically no plot, just a concept, and characters that aren't fascinating enough to make up for it. The descriptions aren't bad by any means, but they just don't have that magically immersive quality that impressed me in The Goldfinch, for example (another long and slow-paced book that I absolutely adored). And yeah, as I was saying, Life after life DRAGS. My mind keeps wandering while reading this thing... It feels like one interminable introduction, I keep waiting for the plot to actually happen, except I'm 198 pages in and it STILL feels like the beginning of the book, with the stage being set.
One more thing that annoyed me about the book: the author has this annoying habit of starting off almost every new chapter right in the middle of the action, with new characters and events she doesn't bother to actually introduce or, respectively, explain until like 10 pages later. I'm sure Atkinson thinks it's very modern and candid and surprising, but really it is just confusing.
I'm usually very good with long and slow-paced books. It's just that, in the case of Life after life, there is practically no plot, just a concept, and characters that aren't fascinating enough to make up for it. The descriptions aren't bad by any means, but they just don't have that magically immersive quality that impressed me in The Goldfinch, for example (another long and slow-paced book that I absolutely adored). And yeah, as I was saying, Life after life DRAGS. My mind keeps wandering while reading this thing... It feels like one interminable introduction, I keep waiting for the plot to actually happen, except I'm 198 pages in and it STILL feels like the beginning of the book, with the stage being set.
One more thing that annoyed me about the book: the author has this annoying habit of starting off almost every new chapter right in the middle of the action, with new characters and events she doesn't bother to actually introduce or, respectively, explain until like 10 pages later. I'm sure Atkinson thinks it's very modern and candid and surprising, but really it is just confusing.