More than just Milo’s lover throughout his countless layovers in the Afterlife, Suzie is literally his reason for living-as he dives into one new existence after another, praying for the day he’ll never have to leave her side again.īut Reincarnation Blues is more than a great love story: Every journey from cradle to grave offers Milo more pieces of the great cosmic puzzle-if only he can piece them together in time to finally understand what it means to be part of something bigger than infinity. But all Milo really wants is to fall forever into the arms of Death. If he doesn’t make the cut, oblivion awaits.

Milo has had 9,995 chances so far and has just five more lives to earn a place in the cosmic soul.

Ten thousand lives to “get it right.” Answer all the Big Questions. “Tales of gods and men akin to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman as penned by a kindred spirit of Douglas Adams.”- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)įirst we live. (Aug.A wildly imaginative novel about a man who is reincarnated over ten thousand lifetimes to be with his one true love: Death herself. Poole aims to amuse more than to philosophize, but his ideas about human nature and the randomness of life make this more than a time-jumping farce. Poore’s past and future settings are sketched with only as much detail as is needed to anchor the emotional journey of his protagonist, an empathetic, bumbling everyman whose mental voice is consistently, contemporarily American. It also lets him reconnect with his socially awkward lover, Death, whom he calls Suzie. Between lives, the afterlife offers Milo rest, feedback from cosmic entities that manifest as cranky old women, and housing that corresponds in quality to the results of the lifetime just completed. His lives (and deaths) range across time and space: a prehistoric village, the traveling party of the Buddha, mundane 20th-century coupledom, radical spacefaring in a future dystopia. The narrative follows Milo, who is approaching the 10,000-reincarnation limit. In Poore’s setup, which owes a bit to Buddhist thought but isn’t dogmatic, a person may be reincarnated up to 10,000 times in the pursuit of perfection. Poore ( Up Jumps the Devil) addresses humans’ relationship to the universe through a clever, personal story filled with gentle humor, wry sweetness, and perhaps even some wisdom.

Reincarnation Blues by Michael Poore