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Book Review
Jun. 30th, 2011 11:18 amBlackout
by Connie Willis
This book is in the same vein as Willis' amazing Doomsday Book, but here the Oxford-based time traveling historians are visiting England during World War II. The cast of characters is bigger than in Willis' earlier time travel novels, which made things seem a little fragmented when I first started reading the book, but that only lasted as long as it took me to get acquainted with everyone. Merope is visiting a rural manor house, in the role of a housemaid, in order to study evacuee children. Polly is in London during the Blitz to study shopgirls and other civilians. Michael is going to Dover for the evacuation from Dunkirk.
Blackout is incredibly gripping - I could barely put it down and in fact stayed up quite late to finish it. For most of the book, the three plot threads stay mostly separate, and each time traveler's story is exciting and full of interesting characters, with a good mix of action, suspense, humor, and tragedy. Willis does an excellent job with the timing and resolution of cliffhangers as she switches between the narratives, too. I also liked her realistic and balanced portrayal of British people trying to carry on with their regular lives while coping with the exigencies of war. Not everyone behaves nobly all the time and Willis does minimal romanticizing of anything (even wartime romance).
Alongside all of this, Merope, Polly, and Michael are seeing the signs that something is going wrong with the mechanisms of time travel, which leaves them dealing with the possibility of being stranded or worse, of history having been altered. This only comes to a head at the very end of Blackout and I expect will be central to the sequel (or more properly, second half of the story), All Clear. I can't wait to see what happens and how it all turns out.
by Connie Willis
This book is in the same vein as Willis' amazing Doomsday Book, but here the Oxford-based time traveling historians are visiting England during World War II. The cast of characters is bigger than in Willis' earlier time travel novels, which made things seem a little fragmented when I first started reading the book, but that only lasted as long as it took me to get acquainted with everyone. Merope is visiting a rural manor house, in the role of a housemaid, in order to study evacuee children. Polly is in London during the Blitz to study shopgirls and other civilians. Michael is going to Dover for the evacuation from Dunkirk.
Blackout is incredibly gripping - I could barely put it down and in fact stayed up quite late to finish it. For most of the book, the three plot threads stay mostly separate, and each time traveler's story is exciting and full of interesting characters, with a good mix of action, suspense, humor, and tragedy. Willis does an excellent job with the timing and resolution of cliffhangers as she switches between the narratives, too. I also liked her realistic and balanced portrayal of British people trying to carry on with their regular lives while coping with the exigencies of war. Not everyone behaves nobly all the time and Willis does minimal romanticizing of anything (even wartime romance).
Alongside all of this, Merope, Polly, and Michael are seeing the signs that something is going wrong with the mechanisms of time travel, which leaves them dealing with the possibility of being stranded or worse, of history having been altered. This only comes to a head at the very end of Blackout and I expect will be central to the sequel (or more properly, second half of the story), All Clear. I can't wait to see what happens and how it all turns out.
