Blackout

I'm about 40 pages in, and all we've got so far is a bunch of bureaucracy and characters running to and fro. Some folks call it “fast paced”–for me it's just frustratingly frantic. This is my second attempt to read it, and I'm going to stop a second time.

I was really excited about Blackout: a new Connie Willis novel set in the Doomsday Book/To Say Nothing of the Dog world, focused on Willis' favorite period in history: the Blitz.

And Blackout is good. It focuses on the stories of three main historians as they travel to different parts of England during 1940 and encounter time travel hitches. Along the way, there are typical Willis flares – cute, yet annoying children; lovable & brave young women with lots of pluck; comedies of errors and confused details; despair redeemed only by having friends to cling to. Her characters are lovable, her comedy is gold, her prose is affecting. It is pure Willis.

And yet. It feels sacrilegious, and maybe I'll go back and revise the three stars once All Clear comes out, but I just didn't love Blackout. The pacing felt a little slow, like I was reading the same day in the life over and over. I resent having to buy two books to get one story and Blackout ended just as it was getting to the point in the plot that I wanted to read. The whole thing feels like a historical set up for a great scifi story, rather than the story itself.

Oh, Ms. Willis! I cannot believe you did this to me! A cliffhanger? After 512 many pages? And I hung in there SO long in the beginning, when the book was so slow to get going! Seriously–during all that nattering about over changed schedules and finding drop sites I nearly screamed to just get on with it already! So it is absolutely ridiculous to find that after more than 500 pages, I am not a nice resolution to any of the various plot lines, but rather am referred to the next boook, [b:All Clear 7519231 All Clear (All Clear, #2) Connie Willis http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1267552735s/7519231.jpg 9735628]!It's a bloody good thing that I 1) really, really like Ms. Willis' work; and 2) already have All Clear on hand and ready to go, or I would have been sorely tempted, sorely, I say, to throw the book across the room. That isn't nearly so satisfying with ebooks, and tends to do absolutely nothing but damage one's hardware, so I imagine I would have refrained.But I absolutely would not suggest this work to a first-time Willis reader. [b:To Say Nothing of the Dog 77773 To Say Nothing of the Dog Connie Willis http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1298434745s/77773.jpg 696], certainly. [b:Bellwether 24985 Bellwether Connie Willis http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167544946s/24985.jpg 1194887], even more so. But not this one, and not [b:Doomsday Book 24983 Doomsday Book Connie Willis http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1287032661s/24983.jpg 2439628] or [b:Lincoln's Dreams 24980 Lincoln's Dreams Connie Willis http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167544943s/24980.jpg 25743] or, honestly, even [b:Fire Watch 10301442 Fire Watch Connie Willis http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51JNKi8g3aL.SL75.jpg 2324159] (the story on which the All Clear duology is based). Willis doesn't write simplistic stories, or I probably wouldn't enjoy her work so much, but she has a way of making the complex clear that's beautiful. It's just that these require a bit more desire to get there on the part of the reader, to my way of thinking, than the other two. And once one is seduced by those, it is clear that the effort is wholly worthwhile.In any case, there's no doubt but that I'm going right on ahead to read [b:All Clear 7519231 All Clear (All Clear, #2) Connie Willis http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1267552735s/7519231.jpg 9735628]. I'm just a bit put out with the author at the moment–and very, very glad, considering the heft of these tomes, that I've switched to ebooks!I still think that readers deserve some small reward for the sheer aggravation meted out thus far. Surely resolving some small plot issues would not have caused trouble? For instance, authors who are accustomed to working with multi-book series regularly wrap up some issues in each book, while leaving other, larger plot threads to carry over into future volumes to provide continuity.