Reincarnation Blues by Michael Poore is a wildly imaginative and thought-provoking novel that blends humor, philosophy, and heart into a captivating narrative about life, death, and everything in between. With its unique premise and memorable characters, this book offers readers a fresh perspective on the concept of reincarnation and what it means to live a meaningful life.

The story follows Milo, a soul who has lived almost 10,000 lives and is nearing the end of his cycle. The cosmic rule is simple: reach perfection, or "enlightenment," within a limited number of lives, or face oblivion. But Milo is in no hurry to achieve enlightenment. He enjoys the variety and experiences that each new life brings, whether he's a beggar, a king, or a cosmic janitor. His reluctance is further complicated by his deep, eternal love for Suzie, who just so happens to be Death herself. As Milo navigates his remaining lives, he grapples with the big questions: What is the meaning of existence? How do you find purpose? And can true love transcend even death?

Poore’s writing is sharp and witty, with a tone that oscillates between playful irreverence and profound insight. The novel’s structure, which moves back and forth through Milo’s various incarnations, is both engaging and inventive, allowing readers to explore different times, places, and situations while keeping the narrative cohesive. Each life is a mini-story in itself, filled with vivid detail and a range of emotions, from the absurdly comic to the deeply tragic.

One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its ability to tackle weighty themes with a light touch. Through Milo’s many lives, Poore explores concepts like mortality, purpose, love, and the nature of the universe, all while maintaining a sense of humor that keeps the story from becoming overly heavy. The philosophical musings are interwoven with the plot in a way that feels organic and accessible, making the book both entertaining and intellectually stimulating.

Milo is a deeply relatable protagonist. His flaws, frustrations, and resistance to the idea of enlightenment make him a character that readers can easily connect with. His relationship with Suzie adds a poignant and romantic layer to the story, offering a tender exploration of love that endures through countless lifetimes. Suzie, as Death, is a fascinating character in her own right—both compassionate and resigned to her role in the cosmic order, yet deeply in love with Milo.

The novel’s humor is another highlight, ranging from clever wordplay to dark, absurdist comedy. Poore has a knack for finding the funny side of even the most existential questions, making Reincarnation Blues a joy to read even as it delves into the mysteries of life and death. The world-building is rich and imaginative, with each of Milo’s lives offering a glimpse into a different aspect of the human experience, as well as the quirks and challenges of the afterlife.

At its core, Reincarnation Blues is a meditation on the human condition, exploring what it means to live a good life, the inevitability of death, and the possibility of something more beyond it all. It’s a novel that invites readers to reflect on their own lives and the choices they make, while also offering a fantastical escape into a world where anything is possible.

For fans of speculative fiction that blends humor with deep philosophical questions—think Good Omens meets The Good Place—Reincarnation Blues is a must-read. Michael Poore has created a story that is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking, with characters and ideas that will linger in your mind long after you’ve turned the last page. Whether you’re looking for a novel that will make you laugh, cry, or simply think, Reincarnation Blues delivers on all fronts.

It took a few attempts to get past the first few chapters of this book, and aside from the fatphobic comments in the narrative and the sexual fantasy focus on female characters, the use of the n-word to describe moon people was the final straw for me. The humor is juvenile and abrasive, and the attempts to be funny fall flat and forced.

I avoided this book for far too long. And it’s mainly because the title and cover promise a different story than the book actually delivers. The author is imaginative and a wonderful storyteller, and the book is a new favorite. It is told as a series of stories that follow the journey of a guy named Milo who has been reincarnated over and over trying to reach perfection. Between each life, he is reunited with his soulmate: Susie (who just happens to be Death).

Milo lives all sorts of lives, including one where he’s exiled to a diabolical space prison ship, one where he nearly becomes a serial killer, and one where he is friends with the Buddha who is slowly sinking into dementia. But always, he comes back to Susie. Part of the reason he never reaches “perfection” and stops the cycles of reincarnation is because he always wants to come back to her.

I loved the imagery of the two of them together, still in love after ages and ages:

“Susie lay against his side like a jigsaw piece. They fit together the way people do when they’ve held each other a hundred thousand times.”

“They were reading newspapers on the couch together, legs intertwined. She gave him kind of a hug with her legs. This, he thought. This is perfection.”

“Imagine that you have a girlfriend, and the two of you have been together as long as your brains can remember. You love each other in a crazy, primitive, soulmate kind of way. You can’t even think what it would be like without her.”

“They still held hands, blooming inside like candles.”

The ending is beautiful as they find each other again and again in hundreds of new ways.

Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t just a love story. There are plenty of fascinating stories between the overarching love story, but that’s what sticks in my mind most.

This was a new and interesting take on the idea of death and reincarnation. It was whimsical and profound and pulled on your heartstrings. The transitions between sections were sometimes abrupt, but I guess life is sometimes abruptly interrupted by death, so in a way that fit.

There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

Milo is running out of lives.

He has been reincarnated 9,995 times, the 10,000 life limit is coming up fast. Sometimes he does really well and then flubs it at the end. Other times he just totally screws the pooch and doesn't come close to maintaining the kind of loosely defined perfection required to step off of the cycle of reincarnation and join the Oversoul.

Part of the reason is Death -- or Suzie, if you prefer. After a couple hundred deaths, Milo has come to love Suzie and the two relish the time the spend together in between Milo's lives. He doesn't really want to join the Oversoul, as it would mean losing Suzie. The only problem is he doesn't have that many chances left.

We see portions of many of Milo's lives, some from our past, others in the distant future. Milo tries to build on what he learned in each previous life. Sometimes he gets closer to perfection, other times not so much. All the while he tries to figure out some way the he and Suzie can be together.

Reincartion Blues is a funny book filled with moments that will break your heart. It is a serious book that will have you examining your own life while laughing out loud. It is a book about learning, gaining wisdom, and about love

In Reincarnation Blues, Milo is the ultimate slacker. He’s lived thousands of lives, but he still hasn’t reached perfection. Instead, he just wants to spend his time in the afterlife with his girlfriend, Susie, who also happens to be one of the incarnations of death. They’ve been together for more than eight thousand years, give or take, and Milo’s primary goal in the afterlife is avoiding transcending to the oversoul so that he can spend eternity watching TV on a couch with Susie.

Things get complicated, as they often do, when Mama and Nan, the caretakers of the afterlife, explain to him that he is about to run out of lives. Every soul gets no more than ten thousand reincarnations, and he’s down to his last five. If he can’t reach perfection and join the oversoul, Mama and Nan will push him off a floating sidewalk into nothingness and oblivion.

Milo thought that all he needed to do was be a wise man, which is why he’d spent his most recent life dispensing wisdom from fishing boat, but it turns out that perfection isn’t that simple. Part of the problem is that every life he lives feels more like killing time until he dies and gets to go back to Susie. Even still, Mama and Nan’s warning scares him into action, and he decides that he’ll do anything he can to reach perfection and avoid dissolving into nothingness.

The conceit of this book means that we follow Milo over the course of a dozen or so lives, each stranger than the last. It’s a bit like reading a collection of short stories with a through-line and common main character. The tone of the book is drily funny throughout, which is helpful because several of Milo’s lives are bleak or downright horrifying.

I will say that there is a point about halfway through the book where it almost lost me. Milo reincarnates somewhere far in the future as a young man with a promising future, but he is falsely accused of rape and sent to a nightmarish prison where the other prisoners rape and torture him.

If the trope of a false rape accusation wasn’t bad enough, the sheer unpleasantness of Milo’s life in prison started to drag the book down for me. However, I hung in to see how things played out, and I’m glad I did, because the end of the chapter redeemed itself. That said, several of Milo’s lives do happen in dystopias, so don’t go into this book expecting a happy time.

Reincarnation Blues is hilarious, moving, shocking and occasionally disturbing. The result is a wonderful coming-of-age story if those can happen to someone after they’ve lived close to ten thousand lives. Maybe a coming-to-wisdom story? Highly recommended.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

One of my New Year's resolutions was to try to be more generous in my book reviews. But then something like Reincarnation Blues comes along and it's just really hard to stick to that promise... I think I'd mind the flaws - the inability to imagine life as anything than what it's like in the author's own North American and VERY male present - less if this were a book that didn't take itself so seriously. What I mean is, this book clearly presents itself as at least semi-serious, like it's got some sort of important message and that it conveys some universal truth about life and what matters etc. Well readers, it turns out that what matters are dumb sexist cliches and modern American stereotypes about how social life works (even if the story is set thousands of years ago in India or wherever). So there you go.

I had tried multiple times to read this. Unfortunately, it never grabbed my interest. I appreciate the opportunity to have had the chance to read it though.

Milo is an old soul - he has lived 9995 lives so far and has yet to achieve perfection. In fact he isn't even sure he wants to achieve perfection as he is in love with Death (or rather a Death - Suzie). This has to change when he is informed that every soul has in fact only 10000 lives to get it right or it will be erased.

Before it came out Reincarnation Blues was one of those book that got so much hype and good press, but those book often aren’t all they are hyped up to be. The general opinion I am observing from other goodreads reviews was that you either really liked or didn’t. I was one of those people that really wanted to like it, but just couldn’t.

Reincarnation Blues is a book about Milo and his seemingly never ending affair with Death (who also goes by Suzie). Milo is in love with death and in order to continue loving her he must continually reincarnate, 9,995 times to be exact, until he reaches perfection. It is also a story about Milo’s own personal journey as he seeks perfection. About how he grows and what he learns. Each chapter is one of Milo’s lives, that the reader is thrust into. We learn and grow as he does as he continues to question what does spiritual perfection look like? Each life is different sometimes appearing as woman, or men, or cyborg and each life is filled with its own unique experiences.

Maybe its not the story itself I have a problem with but just the strangeness of some of the experiences within his lives. His experiences include everything from being a cyborg in space, to a religious prophet figure, to a little girl. The long and short of it is, it was just too weird for me. While I find the concepts of the story itself very interesting, as it does legitimately ask the question how do we find spiritual happiness? The author’s writing style was very different and just to strange for me and the way he goes about answering the question, to me, was not particularly well done. Or maybe it’s the fact that I find the concept of reincarnation not very interesting.

It is definitely a book that is very different, and while I enjoyed picking something up that was not the norm for the types of books I normally read, the author’s dry, to me, writing style, was just not something I particularly enjoyed. Although I liked the basic concept of the story, and I also like how each chapter was a life, almost like reading several novelias within one, it really lost my interest about half way through. That being said, the character development within the character of Milo was one of the most interesting and successful aspects of the story, how as he continued reincarnating his views about life, and his own spiritual experience, changed and grew. Also Poore’s descriptiveness pros, in how he described some of the worlds was particularly I thought well done.

If you like books that take you through all corners of time and space, more of a scifi feel than fantasy, and you like weird strange stories than I would definitely recommend this book. Thank you to #netgalley and the publishers for an E-ARC in exchange for an honest review!

This was a great story but my problem with this book is it seemed to drag. There was just so much of the book that didn't seem needed. I understand the need for background especially on Milo but I think if it had been cut down a little it would have been better. So I had to take one star away for that. I enjoyed the characters and the different story lines especially the end.

This might just be one of those books I reread a few years out. I didn't know what to expect and don't know how to adequately describe it, but I recommend it. Geesh, feeling the pressure of not screwing up your next reincarnation. When Poore has another book out, I will be looking it up.

This book was very confusing to me! I felt like there was too much going on and didn't see much science fiction going on.

Published by Del Rey on August 22, 2017

Reincarnation Blues begins with the protagonist, Milo, being eaten by a shark. Milo has died almost ten thousand times since 2600 B.C. but still, being eaten by a shark isn’t a pleasant death. His most recent life revolved around fishing and drinking, which didn’t earn him many points on Judgment Day. The fact that he’s having sex with Death (when he's not alive) doesn’t improve his standing with those who give judgment, but falling in love with Death is never a good idea.

Sadly, Milo’s first life was his best, and the rewards bestowed after each subsequent death have dwindled. His hopes of reaching Perfection quickly ended centuries before his current death. But Milo enjoys living imperfect lives; he’s decided that Perfection is overrated, much to the consternation of the spiritual guides who encourage or chastise him after every death. But Milo is running out of lives. He needs to get it right soon to avoid Nothingness.

The novel skips around among Milo’s thousands of lives, not giving much attention to his stint as a catfish (that one was a punishment). Milo’s most interesting lives include the one he was living when most life on Earth ended (not long from now), the one he lived inside a prison made from a hollow asteroid after humanity spread to the stars, and the one in which he discovers that Buddha has Alzheimer’s. But there are many other lives, and they all teach him something, even if the lesson is that it’s not smart to reach for deadly spiders.

As you might expect, a novel about the difficulty of reaching perfection comes with messages. One message is that people can’t be productive if they are angry or afraid. Another is that people are shaped by when and where they are born (Milo appreciated the lives in which he knew Muslims were evil because he was born a Christian, and those in which he knew Christians were evil because he was born a Muslim, since God was making it easy for him to identify evil). Another is that (perhaps because of how we are shaped by the place and time of our birth), overcoming limits and achieving Perfection (or even decency) isn’t easy.

But the real message is that living is itself a form of Perfection. The better your life, measured in terms of how you help others, or at least avoid harming them, the more rewarding your life will be. That’s a good message, and Reincarnation Blues teaches it with a great deal of humor and very little preaching. It’s easy to root for Milo and his girlfriend Death, because they’re just ordinary people (well, except for Death), doing the best they can with the lives they have. Or maybe not the best they can, because Milo has a tendency to veer us away from Perfection, but the story offers hope that living a meaningful life is an attainable goal, and that placing an emphasis on love and compassion and helpfulness is the best route to make a life worthy — even if we might have to do it a few thousand times more before we get it right.

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Del Rey and NetGalley provided me with an electronic copy of Reincarnation Blues. I was under no obligation to review this book and my opinion is freely given.

When you have 10,000 chances to get it right, what happens when you neglect to achieve Perfection? Milo has tried many times, but the failures are tinged with sweetness. Meeting with Death - Suzie, as he calls her - before a new life has consequences for them both. With a handful of tries left, will Milo finally gain what he truly wants?

Reincarnation Blues has a great premise, but suffers from too much detail into Milo's lives. At first, the details about Milo's resurrections were interesting, but the repetition made the book lag in the middle. Because readers are introduced to Milo in the context of one person having multiple lives, it seems that his character development is incomplete. In an attempt to show how Milo navigates his ever changing landscape, the author gave too many inconsequential details. Reincarnation Blues is definitely different and may appeal to readers because of its take on life after death.

Great story! The characters are fantastic and the countless lives of Milo made for great stories individually.

It took me a very long time to get into this book, but once I did I was pleasantly surprised! Poore won me over with his writing - it's superbly written and incorporated a great mix of stories and times (sad, pleasant, grotesque and past, present and future). Would recommend to fans of Gaiman or Mitchell.

I was really excited about this book, but found I had a hard time connecting with Milo and envisioning his world. It was not really my reading taste, I found it to be more of a "guy" book. I would recommend it to some people, but there was too much focus on how "bangable" each of his lovers were from his previous lives for me personally. I made it almost halfway through before I quit. On a petty note: I feel like Suzie was a terrible name choice. I know the character would have wanted a downplayed name, but she is a demi-god of sorts. I would have gone with a less cutesy name. Thank you for the reading opportunity!

As Neil Gaiman is an auto-buy author of mine and this book got compared to his type of storytelling, it should be no surprise that I decided to try Michael Poore's Reincarnation Blues out. In all honesty, even without that comparison, I still would have because the premise sounded intriguing enough that I wanted to find out what sort of person Milo was after 10,000 lifetimes and what happened to him over those lifetimes that led to his trying to reunite with Death and made him into whoever/whatever he was at the end of the book.

This is a story about a wise man named Milo.

It begins on the day he was eaten by a shark.



As an opening, this might not sound like a great beginning for Milo, but to be perfectly frank, it wasn't what I was expecting and it elicited a chuckled from myself. I thought I, as the reader, was off to a fairly good start.

There are glimpses right away as to what kind of person Milo is now. After thousands upon thousand of lifetimes, he's gathered a lot of knowledge together and is somewhat sought after for it. He lives a relatively quite life on his fishing boat, taking people out on excursions that, more often than not, turn into quests for information or solutions to their problems rather than a quest for the perfect catch of fish.

This particular life, being the first that we are introduced to as readers, hit me the hardest. While there wasn't a lot of time to get used to Milo as a character, he was the main person and there was a sense of peace I drew from him, from his insight into himself and others, his dog Burt and his friend Arlene at the hospital he took care of that morning. It, frankly, sucked to let this "him" go.

His last words were "No! Fuck! No!"



I appreciated that this book was brutally honest and still funny. You think your last words, or the words of some guy that's lived tens of thousands of lives, are going to be poetic? Well, odds are as evidence by those of Milo's above, they aren't. Maybe, but there are no guarantees.

After meeting Milo and getting the gist of who he is, we're flung into the rest of his journey. There is insight into more of his deaths, some far more preferable than others, though are any really preferred? In any case, Reincarnation Blues takes us all over the world, including California, Sudan, China, and Vienna, among others, all looking toward reuniting with Death. It's a complicated journey and while Milo makes comments on the times he's known about the end coming, the times he's been able to prepare such as it were, and the times the end has been a true shock (only once), it made me think about what the readers of this book would think about their own lives.

Aside from the depths of the story itself, the writing style lent itself to this series of lives in a way that going from one to the next never felt rough, never felt like I was missing something. Some of the lives were shorter than others, yes, but they didn't feel cut off unnecessarily.

Would you want to know the end? Is being able to plan preferable or does it take away from living the life you've been given this time? I think a lot of it depends on what your view of the afterlife or afterlives is, but whatever that view might be, I think reading about Milo's journey offers a lot of emotion that will resonate with people. There's not just Milo on his journey, but a shark who was once a Strawberry Queen and more. Who might you have once been in this world? Who would you be in Milo's position? Food for thought, that.