I remembered really loving The Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, although I apparently read those well before I started keeping track for this site (or its previous incarnations) and I was super excited to hear Willis had a new book out! (And thanks for the bday present, Cat!)

She falls somewhere between the Diana Gabaldon Outlander books (with the time travel, of course) and Maureen McHugh (more sci/fi fantasty, less romance than Gabaldon) in my mind.

I felt this one was a bit slowgoing at first, there are SO many characters to set up, in different places both in space and time. But about halfway through I found myself quite eagerly turning the pages and then…OH NO IT’S BEEN TURNED INTO A TWO-PART BOOK AND THIS IS ONLY THE FIRST HALF NOOOOOOOOO
Yeah, that’s putting it mildly. Apparently part 2 “All Clear” will be out in October.

Really cool intertwining of historians from the future (2060) sent back to research WWII England. The contretemps of trying to find the right outfits, accents, accessories, etc., is quite entertaining. The effect of them navigating the past, trying to observe with the minimum of involvement and no interaction; can that ever really be possible? There have been a bunch of History teachers-to-be in my classes this year and we’ve done a lot of talking about “historical fact” and it’s really interesting to read this with that type of semantics in mind.

I was really psyched about who arrives in the last chapter (or who I think it is that arrives). I hope to see more of that character in book 2…