I was quite intrigued when I picked up this novel, because it is partly based on the journals kept by Victor Hugo about his spiritualist experiments during the first years of his self-imposed political exile from France, when he and his family were living on Jersey in the Channel Islands.
The author, whose previous bestseller, The Reincarnationist, became the basis of the hit television series Past Lives, weaves her fictitious tale of three troubled souls doomed to relive their curse through succesives reincarnatons. Theo Gaspard, his wife Naomi, and his brother Ash are just completing another cycle of this tragedy when they encounter Jac, a woman with the extraordinary ability to channel the past lives of others.The novel suffers however from uneven pacing as Rose juggles four
different story lines, and although she constantly repeats the mantra
"there are no coincidences," so much of her story depends on
coincidence that it loses credibility. The story line that draws most on
Hugo's journal is the best written; but the rest of the characters are like
bad actors reading from a worse script.
