Green Darkness by Anya Seton

Grabbed a secondhand copy of this book at the Salvation Army bin, but they do seem to be reprinting it often as a big fat hardcover, so don't give up. What caught my eye immediately was the promise of a tale that deals with reincarnation, a novel with intertwining past lives. In fact, the first lives are historically based in fact - a girl who loves a monk is walled up alive and he kills himself. From this brutal and shocking starting point we travel not only through a long and detailed story of Tudor England, but also the modern meeting of these two characters and the imprint this prior life has left on them.

So here we are following two stories - we know how the first one ends right from the start, so we know to cringe as all the details and events pile up on one another, leading up to that disastrous day. And since this suspense is pretty much doomed from the start, there is at least that optimistic second story. In a way it feeds our hope that maybe the ending won't be what we expect after all, since *poof* here we've got the same couple in 1968 - let's see how they sort out this mess.

There were moments when I was entirely able to suspend my disbelief and felt like I had been transported to Tudor England and even better, that I understood all the treachery and religious fanaticism of the times. The suspense was powerful enough that I resorted to a reading style I thought I'd abandoned in adolescence - skimming. Hey, I promise to go back and read all those quaint, historically accurate characters properly but it was more important at 3 am to know what happened next. And to get to the sexy bits - who knew the monk-babe was a female fantasy?

Ahem, anyway, full of very cool reincarnation thoughts, details and info. Also provided an explanation of sorts why some people seem to have the most irrational disasters occur to themselves one after another, a kind of kharmic crisis coming back to haunt them. It is mind boggling to consider one's life in that sort of light, so for that I recommend you haunt secondhand bookstores, wait for the back orders or pick this one up at the library.

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