I did enjoy Life After Life a lot but I was initially disappointed by the ending. I was expecting the plot to come to some sort of conclusion; Ursula would find the correct combination of decisions in her life, and the right luck, to have a happy ending for herself and/or others, Groundhog Day style. I thought it might be the life where she shot Hitler, the one that we saw in the very beginning of the book. Not a happy ending for her, but it could have saved many lives. When we got back to that though there was another life after. After the life where she lived through the war and found Teddy alive I thought that was going to be the last one, but after that the book ended on another Feb 11th, 1910. That indicated to me that there was no reason she was reliving her life over and over again, and that there wasn’t necessarily a right or wrong way for her to be living her life. The more I have thought about the ending the more I like it.
On a somewhat different note, while I was reading this book I kept thinking about the Vlogbrothers debate about whether if you had a time machine it would be okay to go back in time and kill baby Hitler to stop him. This book had several instances where you had to question whether the ends justified the means, when Ursula pushed Bridget down the stairs. She saved them all from getting sick, but she could have killed her. And of course when she shoots Hitler. The Nerdfighters came up with the Evil Baby Orphanage to solve the evil baby Hitler question, but it’s easier to come up with a solution to a hypothetical problem when you have a hypothetical time machine.
There was something interesting I wanted to mention because we were talking in class about the significance of the animals in this book. I was watching an interview with a conservation biologist the other day and she was talking about all the challenges there are in saving endangered predatory animals, like tigers and wolves. She mentioned that people all over the world have a very negative perception of wolves in particular for some reason. This book contained several characters whose names were similar to, or meant, wolf, or who were described as wolfish.