Reincarnation Blues Review

This week's novel is Reincarnation Blues by Michael Poore.  I heard about this, because it was on NPR's list of best books of 2017.

Milo has lived 9,995 lives and is having a fairly good time spending his alive time as a wise man and spending the time between lives shacking up with his eternal girlfriend, Death, who prefers to go by Suzie.  However, the powers that be explain to Milo that he only gets 10,000 chances to reach perfection in life and become one with the cosmic everything.  If he doesn't manage it in the next five lives, he'll be pushed into an abyss and turned to nothing.

This is an interesting book, because the over-arching conflict is whether or not Milo will get his act together and do something ambiguously perfect instead of being so lazy.  It's funny and light-hearted, and you can assume (from the spacing of the chapter breaks at the bottom of the Kindle screen) that he'll get it (or something equivalent.  I was expecting his act of perfection to take place in the afterlife) done on his last chance.  However, the five lives we watch him live have no promises of a happy ending, and they get bleak real fast.  There's torture, mutilation, rape, slavery, and then the added tension that if he wants to achieve perfection, a deus ex machina to come rescue him from the future prison planet is only going to momentarily relieve my anxiety. 

So that made for an interesting reading experience, because I was rooting for him to get out of terrible situations and then feeling a little bad that a quick fix wouldn't save his immortal soul and also frustrated that there were so many soul crushing systems in place that he would have to fight against to make any changes that would matter enough to the powers that be.

I also have a lot of questions about predetermination that the book never touches on.  When he's reincarnated, he could go anywhere in time.  The ancient past, the near present, the far future.  (It's a good craft technique, because then Poore can keep the humor moderns and consistent throughout.) But then I have questions.  If he goes back to the sixties and shoots JFK, is that how it always happened?  Does he get to choose to do that?  Does that affect things in the future?  How do the powers that be not know how each of his lives are going to turn out?  I HAVE A LOT OF QUESTIONS.


***

Next week: One of Us is Lying, a YA mystery thriller by Karen M. McManus.