Well written but in the end it all just seemed futile. Urusla was able to make some adjustments that helped her and her family but they were all Etch a Sketch-ed out when she died so I was just left with the feeling of 'what's the point though?' ( )

Fun book and the writing was good. For a book about somebody repeating the same lifetime again and again it was surprisingly not science-fiction-y at all. ( )

Enjoyed it as I have all of Kate Atkinson's books. The unusual technique of losing the heroine each chapter was not a problem for me and I was just as eager to continue with her revised life and alternate events. The characters leaped off the page and took up easy residence in my imagination no matter their resolution. The writing was excellent. ( )

I loved the premise of this book, and was engaged and involved from the very first page. At every point in our lives, as heroine Ursula Todd discovers, chance, choice, the choices of others or happenstance govern the path our life follows. Kate Atkinson explores those possibilities, re-telling aspects of Ursula's story time after time as different paths are taken.

The book works well in developing this idea, and it works well as a family saga too, telling the story of her sister, her three brothers, her parents and aunt, who to a lesser extent have their paths re-cast too.

My only quibble came after 400 pages, when I found there were still 200 to go. I felt Atkinson had said much of what she needed to say, and that little was gained by extending the narrative. Her descriptions of blitz-damaged London were evocative and involving, whereas the latter part of the book, set in Germany, worked less well for me.

This is an original book, witty and thought-provoking. I'd recommend it even more heartily if it were just a little shorter. ( )

I’ve read most of Kate Atkinson’s books, but I didn’t rush out to buy this one, as the reviews all focussed on the “branching narrative” thing and made it sound as if it would be rather gimmicky. It is gimmicky, of course, but now I finally get around to reading it (the book club picked it for this month) I have to admit that Atkinson is a good enough writer to get away with being gimmicky. It’s a very professionally assembled historical novel that gives us — multiple — convincing pictures of what it might have been like to grow up as the daughter of a middle-class Home Counties family in the first half of the 20th century.

We move pretty seamlessly from a Forster-ish view of the Todd family in its idyllic outer-suburban retreat ca. 1910 to a Stephen Spender view of the London Blitz (plus additional graphic horror that no-one writing at the time would have put in, but which we need because most of us nowadays haven’t actually lived through that kind of experience ourselves). Along the way, Atkinson gets us to think about things like the position of domestic servants, violence against women, and the limitation of educational and career opportunities for girls, all without ever seeming to be pressing any obviously anachronistic buttons. (Atkinson is from a similar background and generation to me, and her knowledge about England in the first half of the century must come from much the same kind of sources as mine, so it’s perhaps not surprising that it all rings so true…)

I’m not sure if the “multiple lives” thing actually adds much, but perhaps it does allow Atkinson to play with a wider range of ideas and settings than might comfortably have fitted into a simple linear narrative. And it does raise some interesting ideas about the arbitrariness of the kind of small events that dictate how our lives will turn out, even if we ignore all the slightly silly reincarnation and déjà-vu and “what if I went back to assassinate Hitler?” stuff. ( )