Beforelife
3/5
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About this ebook
It’s okay if you don’t believe in the afterlife. The people who live there don’t believe in you, either.
What if you went to heaven and no one there believed in Earth? This is the question at the heart of Beforelife, a satirical novel that follows the post-mortem adventures of Ian Brown, a man who dies on the book’s first page and finds himself in an afterlife where no one else believes in “pre-incarnation.” The other residents of the afterlife have mysteriously forgotten their pre-mortem lives and think that anyone who remembers a mortal life is suffering from a mental disorder called the “Beforelife Delusion.”
None of that really matters to Ian. All he wants to do is reunite with Penelope, his wife. Scouring the afterlife for any sign of her, Ian accidentally winds up on a quest to prove that the beforelife is real. This puts him squarely into the crosshairs of some of history’s greatest heroes and villains, all of whom seem unhealthily obsessed with erasing Ian’s memories and preventing him from reminding anyone of their pre-mortem lives. Only by staying a step ahead of his enemies can Ian hope to keep his much-needed marbles, find Penelope, and restore the public’s memories of the beforelife.
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Reviews for Beforelife
7 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I love the premise, and I love the snark. Some truly clever turns of phrase are littered throughout the book. However, sometimes there was too much snark, even for me (and I’m full of snark myself). It’s a bit on the nose to have a sidekick in a book who is a mental patient for believing he is a character in a book. Also, this book is long. It’s fun, but it is long.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Don't let my two stars detain you. This was simply not for me. Others seem to have enjoyed it. I'm told it's a funny book, but I did not find it so, and since it was unlike to pay off in other respects (a thrilling page-turner, a deeply-moving character study, etc.) I stopped reading.
What especially turned me off, though, was the sheer illogicality of it. In a fantasy, one has to be Very Logical (somewhat paradoxically) or you lose readers like me, in droves. If the world into which Ian was re-born believed former lives were a delusion, then why refer to the delusion as "memory?" At one point the matron suggests that his belief in a prior body is silly since where did his new body come from then? (I would suggest, like all bodies, from the river that purportedly creates them for the first time).
And who cares what one's belief about prior-to-the-river is? It makes no difference now. In our world, whether you think your soul is new, or re-incarnated, or isn't a thing and doesn't exist, we don't lock you up one way or the other, and it makes little difference to living our lives.
So, that irked. And if I'm irked, and not laughing at supposedly humorous books, I stop. I got more giggles out of Jane Austen's Sanditon. (And that's not a dig--it's hilarious--and Beforelife wasn't).
(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). I feel a lot of readers automatically render any book they enjoy 5, but I grade on a curve!