The Forgetting Time

"My son is reincarnated from someone else!" If in real life someone told me that I would roll my eyes and try to change the subject as soon as I could.

However fiction is a different story. Fiction can develop characters and plot lines that explore things we may not understand in our lives in a compelling way.  The Forgetting Time succeeds with this.

Contrasting the American cynicism to Indian beliefs and a character who is supposed to be related to the boy in a past life being skeptical makes the book grounded. So does the desperation of a mother at her wits end in trying to help her son.

There was a book that was "cited" through the novel. It was a big surprise for me that the book Old Souls is an actual book that the author obtained permission to cite  throughout the novel. This is the part that I find less plausible. I love following blogs like SciBabe and  Science Enthusiasta. I am sure that they would break this apart as trying to measure something that already has no empirical evidence.

I know that it is human nature to want to find a bigger meaning behind death. Constructing stories to make sense of what happens when we die is a way that humans have comforted themselves throughout the course of time. These stories can be compelling. But the truth is no one truly knows what happens when we die. When this idea is presented to me as a story I am more open to it than having it presented to me as scientific "fact."

One of the characters in the story has a tattoo her arm that symbolizes that fact that we only live once that is referred to throughout the story. This is the only truth I cling to and I constantly pray to make the most of each minute that is given to me. But exploring an imaginative possibility in a novel like this is still an enjoyable experience.