I'm rating this book two stars only on a technicality...which is that technically speaking, this book sucks. 
 Ursula Todd is an English-born nobody. Born into a large wealthy family, there isn't a whole lot about her that stands out. She shares a closeness with one or two of her siblings, but overall she has a pretty meek personality and remains largely invisible most of her life--with the caveat that "most of her life" in Ursula's case actually means "most of her lives" because this bitch keeps on dropping dead and coming back again. 
 Life After Life is a book that focuses on Ursula's slow build-up, over the course of multiple lives (because it takes her hundreds of tries to get it right), to assassinating Adolf Hitler. This is not a spoiler, by the way. The assassination occurs on page one. The hundreds of lives it takes for her to get to that point occur on pages two through five hundred twenty-nine. And that includes the following exits, stage left (spoiler alert if you're a Final Destination fan): umbilical cord strangulation, asphyxiation by natural gas, blunt force trauma by a falling brick wall, blunt force trauma by a homicidal husband, suicide by cyanide capsule, stroke (or whatever the hell that was on the park bench), falling off a roof, Spanish flu, drowning, Blitz bombing. Some of these happen repeatedly because it takes Ursula several lives to figure out that she's doing something wrong and needs to adjust her strategy. She can't exactly remember her previous deaths, but she does know something is amiss and can occasionally execute a modification to her preordained path and avoid that outcome...only to have a different mortal outcome occur in its stead, of course. (But truthfully, most of the time the modification occurs on its own without her having to do anything at all. Magic!) 
 And that is what is most bothersome to me, I think (besides her dull personality). It is exhausting to read about a woman dying over and over again only to be reborn right back where she started, and all without seeming to have any input into anything whatsoever. She just goes along with the program, a plastic bag beaten about by the wind. All the dumb things she has done along the way, all the idiots she enters into relationships with, it all starts over, and then you start to get confused as to who's alive and who's dead in this new life of hers and is she still with this person? Is she a mother this time around? A spinster? And then you start to realize that who cares. It doesn't matter. She'll just die again anyway. In fact the only time she ever starts to make real decisions is toward the end of the novel after she has lived a ludicrous number of lives, and are we supposed to be at this point rooting for her? What most of us have just one lifetime to figure out she gets hundreds, and even so it's still not enough? One of my favorite of Ursula's decisions is that after dying a bunch of times in the Blitz, she decides to spend her next life somewhere safer and moves from London to fucking Munich. 
 Good grief. 
 Also, the character interactions, which is something I usually enjoy in novels, is pretty nonexistent here. Characters don't have meaningful interactions in Life After Life; they merely quip and provide one-liners before the narrative moves onto the next scene (which is often just as dull). Reading this book ultimately became tiresome to me, which is not really how you want your reading experience to go. 
 Looking at the ratings for this novel it's clear I'm in the minority, which is why I felt a certain pressure to isolate the components of it that irritated me or caused me to dislike it, but the truth is I don't really know for sure if it was any of these things in particular or if it was the whole package to blame, but the bottom line is that this book was just not for me.