It took a few attempts to get past the first few chapters of this book, and aside from the fatphobic comments in the narrative and the sexual fantasy focus on female characters, the use of the n-word to describe moon people was the final straw for me. The humor is juvenile and abrasive, and the attempts to be funny fall flat and forced.

I avoided this book for far too long. And it’s mainly because the title and cover promise a different story than the book actually delivers. The author is imaginative and a wonderful storyteller, and the book is a new favorite. It is told as a series of stories that follow the journey of a guy named Milo who has been reincarnated over and over trying to reach perfection. Between each life, he is reunited with his soulmate: Susie (who just happens to be Death).

Milo lives all sorts of lives, including one where he’s exiled to a diabolical space prison ship, one where he nearly becomes a serial killer, and one where he is friends with the Buddha who is slowly sinking into dementia. But always, he comes back to Susie. Part of the reason he never reaches “perfection” and stops the cycles of reincarnation is because he always wants to come back to her.

I loved the imagery of the two of them together, still in love after ages and ages:

“Susie lay against his side like a jigsaw piece. They fit together the way people do when they’ve held each other a hundred thousand times.”

“They were reading newspapers on the couch together, legs intertwined. She gave him kind of a hug with her legs. This, he thought. This is perfection.”

“Imagine that you have a girlfriend, and the two of you have been together as long as your brains can remember. You love each other in a crazy, primitive, soulmate kind of way. You can’t even think what it would be like without her.”

“They still held hands, blooming inside like candles.”

The ending is beautiful as they find each other again and again in hundreds of new ways.

Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t just a love story. There are plenty of fascinating stories between the overarching love story, but that’s what sticks in my mind most.

This was a new and interesting take on the idea of death and reincarnation. It was whimsical and profound and pulled on your heartstrings. The transitions between sections were sometimes abrupt, but I guess life is sometimes abruptly interrupted by death, so in a way that fit.

There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

Milo is running out of lives.

He has been reincarnated 9,995 times, the 10,000 life limit is coming up fast. Sometimes he does really well and then flubs it at the end. Other times he just totally screws the pooch and doesn't come close to maintaining the kind of loosely defined perfection required to step off of the cycle of reincarnation and join the Oversoul.

Part of the reason is Death -- or Suzie, if you prefer. After a couple hundred deaths, Milo has come to love Suzie and the two relish the time the spend together in between Milo's lives. He doesn't really want to join the Oversoul, as it would mean losing Suzie. The only problem is he doesn't have that many chances left.

We see portions of many of Milo's lives, some from our past, others in the distant future. Milo tries to build on what he learned in each previous life. Sometimes he gets closer to perfection, other times not so much. All the while he tries to figure out some way the he and Suzie can be together.

Reincartion Blues is a funny book filled with moments that will break your heart. It is a serious book that will have you examining your own life while laughing out loud. It is a book about learning, gaining wisdom, and about love

In Reincarnation Blues, Milo is the ultimate slacker. He’s lived thousands of lives, but he still hasn’t reached perfection. Instead, he just wants to spend his time in the afterlife with his girlfriend, Susie, who also happens to be one of the incarnations of death. They’ve been together for more than eight thousand years, give or take, and Milo’s primary goal in the afterlife is avoiding transcending to the oversoul so that he can spend eternity watching TV on a couch with Susie.

Things get complicated, as they often do, when Mama and Nan, the caretakers of the afterlife, explain to him that he is about to run out of lives. Every soul gets no more than ten thousand reincarnations, and he’s down to his last five. If he can’t reach perfection and join the oversoul, Mama and Nan will push him off a floating sidewalk into nothingness and oblivion.

Milo thought that all he needed to do was be a wise man, which is why he’d spent his most recent life dispensing wisdom from fishing boat, but it turns out that perfection isn’t that simple. Part of the problem is that every life he lives feels more like killing time until he dies and gets to go back to Susie. Even still, Mama and Nan’s warning scares him into action, and he decides that he’ll do anything he can to reach perfection and avoid dissolving into nothingness.

The conceit of this book means that we follow Milo over the course of a dozen or so lives, each stranger than the last. It’s a bit like reading a collection of short stories with a through-line and common main character. The tone of the book is drily funny throughout, which is helpful because several of Milo’s lives are bleak or downright horrifying.

I will say that there is a point about halfway through the book where it almost lost me. Milo reincarnates somewhere far in the future as a young man with a promising future, but he is falsely accused of rape and sent to a nightmarish prison where the other prisoners rape and torture him.

If the trope of a false rape accusation wasn’t bad enough, the sheer unpleasantness of Milo’s life in prison started to drag the book down for me. However, I hung in to see how things played out, and I’m glad I did, because the end of the chapter redeemed itself. That said, several of Milo’s lives do happen in dystopias, so don’t go into this book expecting a happy time.

Reincarnation Blues is hilarious, moving, shocking and occasionally disturbing. The result is a wonderful coming-of-age story if those can happen to someone after they’ve lived close to ten thousand lives. Maybe a coming-to-wisdom story? Highly recommended.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

One of my New Year's resolutions was to try to be more generous in my book reviews. But then something like Reincarnation Blues comes along and it's just really hard to stick to that promise... I think I'd mind the flaws - the inability to imagine life as anything than what it's like in the author's own North American and VERY male present - less if this were a book that didn't take itself so seriously. What I mean is, this book clearly presents itself as at least semi-serious, like it's got some sort of important message and that it conveys some universal truth about life and what matters etc. Well readers, it turns out that what matters are dumb sexist cliches and modern American stereotypes about how social life works (even if the story is set thousands of years ago in India or wherever). So there you go.

I had tried multiple times to read this. Unfortunately, it never grabbed my interest. I appreciate the opportunity to have had the chance to read it though.

Milo is an old soul - he has lived 9995 lives so far and has yet to achieve perfection. In fact he isn't even sure he wants to achieve perfection as he is in love with Death (or rather a Death - Suzie). This has to change when he is informed that every soul has in fact only 10000 lives to get it right or it will be erased.

Before it came out Reincarnation Blues was one of those book that got so much hype and good press, but those book often aren’t all they are hyped up to be. The general opinion I am observing from other goodreads reviews was that you either really liked or didn’t. I was one of those people that really wanted to like it, but just couldn’t.

Reincarnation Blues is a book about Milo and his seemingly never ending affair with Death (who also goes by Suzie). Milo is in love with death and in order to continue loving her he must continually reincarnate, 9,995 times to be exact, until he reaches perfection. It is also a story about Milo’s own personal journey as he seeks perfection. About how he grows and what he learns. Each chapter is one of Milo’s lives, that the reader is thrust into. We learn and grow as he does as he continues to question what does spiritual perfection look like? Each life is different sometimes appearing as woman, or men, or cyborg and each life is filled with its own unique experiences.

Maybe its not the story itself I have a problem with but just the strangeness of some of the experiences within his lives. His experiences include everything from being a cyborg in space, to a religious prophet figure, to a little girl. The long and short of it is, it was just too weird for me. While I find the concepts of the story itself very interesting, as it does legitimately ask the question how do we find spiritual happiness? The author’s writing style was very different and just to strange for me and the way he goes about answering the question, to me, was not particularly well done. Or maybe it’s the fact that I find the concept of reincarnation not very interesting.

It is definitely a book that is very different, and while I enjoyed picking something up that was not the norm for the types of books I normally read, the author’s dry, to me, writing style, was just not something I particularly enjoyed. Although I liked the basic concept of the story, and I also like how each chapter was a life, almost like reading several novelias within one, it really lost my interest about half way through. That being said, the character development within the character of Milo was one of the most interesting and successful aspects of the story, how as he continued reincarnating his views about life, and his own spiritual experience, changed and grew. Also Poore’s descriptiveness pros, in how he described some of the worlds was particularly I thought well done.

If you like books that take you through all corners of time and space, more of a scifi feel than fantasy, and you like weird strange stories than I would definitely recommend this book. Thank you to #netgalley and the publishers for an E-ARC in exchange for an honest review!

This was a great story but my problem with this book is it seemed to drag. There was just so much of the book that didn't seem needed. I understand the need for background especially on Milo but I think if it had been cut down a little it would have been better. So I had to take one star away for that. I enjoyed the characters and the different story lines especially the end.

A comic and yet, philosophical take on life and the human condition. The character of Milo through all his incarnations was interesting and likeable to follow, good as there were many lives and spans of time in which we did. I found myself rooting for Milo and Suzie and their story set against the backdrop of the cosmos.

This might just be one of those books I reread a few years out. I didn't know what to expect and don't know how to adequately describe it, but I recommend it. Geesh, feeling the pressure of not screwing up your next reincarnation. When Poore has another book out, I will be looking it up.

This book was very confusing to me! I felt like there was too much going on and didn't see much science fiction going on.

Published by Del Rey on August 22, 2017

Reincarnation Blues begins with the protagonist, Milo, being eaten by a shark. Milo has died almost ten thousand times since 2600 B.C. but still, being eaten by a shark isn’t a pleasant death. His most recent life revolved around fishing and drinking, which didn’t earn him many points on Judgment Day. The fact that he’s having sex with Death (when he's not alive) doesn’t improve his standing with those who give judgment, but falling in love with Death is never a good idea.

Sadly, Milo’s first life was his best, and the rewards bestowed after each subsequent death have dwindled. His hopes of reaching Perfection quickly ended centuries before his current death. But Milo enjoys living imperfect lives; he’s decided that Perfection is overrated, much to the consternation of the spiritual guides who encourage or chastise him after every death. But Milo is running out of lives. He needs to get it right soon to avoid Nothingness.

The novel skips around among Milo’s thousands of lives, not giving much attention to his stint as a catfish (that one was a punishment). Milo’s most interesting lives include the one he was living when most life on Earth ended (not long from now), the one he lived inside a prison made from a hollow asteroid after humanity spread to the stars, and the one in which he discovers that Buddha has Alzheimer’s. But there are many other lives, and they all teach him something, even if the lesson is that it’s not smart to reach for deadly spiders.

As you might expect, a novel about the difficulty of reaching perfection comes with messages. One message is that people can’t be productive if they are angry or afraid. Another is that people are shaped by when and where they are born (Milo appreciated the lives in which he knew Muslims were evil because he was born a Christian, and those in which he knew Christians were evil because he was born a Muslim, since God was making it easy for him to identify evil). Another is that (perhaps because of how we are shaped by the place and time of our birth), overcoming limits and achieving Perfection (or even decency) isn’t easy.

But the real message is that living is itself a form of Perfection. The better your life, measured in terms of how you help others, or at least avoid harming them, the more rewarding your life will be. That’s a good message, and Reincarnation Blues teaches it with a great deal of humor and very little preaching. It’s easy to root for Milo and his girlfriend Death, because they’re just ordinary people (well, except for Death), doing the best they can with the lives they have. Or maybe not the best they can, because Milo has a tendency to veer us away from Perfection, but the story offers hope that living a meaningful life is an attainable goal, and that placing an emphasis on love and compassion and helpfulness is the best route to make a life worthy — even if we might have to do it a few thousand times more before we get it right.

RECOMMENDED

Del Rey and NetGalley provided me with an electronic copy of Reincarnation Blues. I was under no obligation to review this book and my opinion is freely given.

When you have 10,000 chances to get it right, what happens when you neglect to achieve Perfection? Milo has tried many times, but the failures are tinged with sweetness. Meeting with Death - Suzie, as he calls her - before a new life has consequences for them both. With a handful of tries left, will Milo finally gain what he truly wants?

Reincarnation Blues has a great premise, but suffers from too much detail into Milo's lives. At first, the details about Milo's resurrections were interesting, but the repetition made the book lag in the middle. Because readers are introduced to Milo in the context of one person having multiple lives, it seems that his character development is incomplete. In an attempt to show how Milo navigates his ever changing landscape, the author gave too many inconsequential details. Reincarnation Blues is definitely different and may appeal to readers because of its take on life after death.

Great story! The characters are fantastic and the countless lives of Milo made for great stories individually.

A really enjoyable book. Milo is an endearing character, and I really liked the premise of a love story set over multiple reincarnations with more humour than sappiness. A lot of fun,

It took me a very long time to get into this book, but once I did I was pleasantly surprised! Poore won me over with his writing - it's superbly written and incorporated a great mix of stories and times (sad, pleasant, grotesque and past, present and future). Would recommend to fans of Gaiman or Mitchell.

I was really excited about this book, but found I had a hard time connecting with Milo and envisioning his world. It was not really my reading taste, I found it to be more of a "guy" book. I would recommend it to some people, but there was too much focus on how "bangable" each of his lovers were from his previous lives for me personally. I made it almost halfway through before I quit. On a petty note: I feel like Suzie was a terrible name choice. I know the character would have wanted a downplayed name, but she is a demi-god of sorts. I would have gone with a less cutesy name. Thank you for the reading opportunity!