What could have been a very powerful book turned out tedious and filled with old wives' tales---the "deadly" umbilical cord around a baby's neck, cats smothering babies---and the playing out of the "would you kill baby Hitler?" party question. I'm very skeptical of Sylvie's being able to find someone doing talk therapy in the early 1920s, and if the oft-repeated notion that "practice makes perfect" is the guiding principle in the case of rebirth, what exactly defines "perfect"? Ursula seems trapped no matter what she does. 
 Oh, and I think it would have been a more powerful ending had the novel ended in 1967. 
 There were parts of this book that were written in rich, lyrical language, and the practice-makes-perfect premise was interesting, but in the end, Bill Murray did it better.