Book Stuff: life after life by Kate Atkinson *contains mild spoilers*

I've just finished reading life after life by Kate Atkinson, I've been eyeing this book up in shops for about 6 months, so I was ecstatic to find a copy of it in my library, as my budget for book buying this year is minimal. It is a fairly chunky book at 615 pages and it took me four weeks to read, but that is only because I started reading it just before I got a really bad head cold where I couldn't bear to look at a book for a fortnight, without that I think I would have devoured the book in days. The story goes a little something like this, during a snow storm in 1910 Ursula Todd is born and dies immediately at birth, on the same day in the same snow Storm Ursula Todd is born and lives to tell the tale and many after that. Ursula is gifted with a strange ability to relive her life over and over again, but in kind of different variations and parallel universises of the same life. The question of reincarnation and the journey of our souls is something that fascinates me, I quite often get senses of de ja vu, or feel instant connections to other people that I can't quite explain, so I was keen to explore this book and the questions that it was posing. I'm going to admit that I did sometimes find this book difficult to follow, it flits with alternating chapters anywhere between 1910 and 1967 as Ursula lives out her various lives, but as you get to understand the characters and the various periods of time it becomes a little easier to deal with. With themes of rape, domestic abuse, sexual assaults on children, war and abortion I did quite often find myself getting a little depressed while reading this book, but as Ursula gets an unlimited number of restarts on her life there was a lot of relief from the alternate versions of her life where the bad stuff hadn't happened. About mid way through the book when it seemed to settle heavily into the period of the second world war, I found myself asking if you had the ability to live your life over why would you keep coming back to the point where you live through war time? Surely you wouldnt choose that over and over again? As I got the end of the book though I understood why Ursula had to live through that in various capacities,ultimately in order to bring greater good to the world. I felt the book could have been a lot cooler if we had some kind of inner dialogue from her Ursula's soul or something like that. For instance why in some cases when she lived her life again did she make it so something bad hadn't happened? And why at other times did she ultimately go back to living the same scenario? This book has had me asking a lot of big questions about how much of our life journey is really chosen by our soul and how much of it is fate? If I had Ursula's gift would I go out of my way to do things differently or are there certain things that however bad they are I need to experience them? I gave this book 4 stars on good reads, its worth a read but like I said it has some heavy themes and requires serious concentration to keep up with the story moving between time periods.