Willis, Connie: To Say Nothing of the Dog
Written by: Connie Willis
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 493 (Mass Market Paperback)
The premise: ganked from BN.com: Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest. He's been shuttling between the 21st century and the 1940s searching for a Victorian atrocity called the bishop's bird stump. It's part of a project to restore the famed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a Nazi air raid over a hundred years earlier.
But then Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler, inadvertently brings back something from the past. Now Ned must jump back to the Victorian era to help Verity put things right--not only to save the project but to prevent altering history itself.
My Rating
Worth the Cash: but kind of close to a "give it away" only because it's not my type of humor (though I was amused and laughed out loud once in a while), and I'm still stewing over time travel as a plot device. And I stress, I love time travel, but I'm trying to decide if I like how it's used in this specific book, whereas I loved Willis's use of time travel in Doomsday Book. And that, in and of itself, is part of the reason this book didn't shine for me: I'd already had my expectations built with Doomsday Book and Passage, both books I loved, that reading To Say Nothing of the Dog was a very jarring experience, because the writing style is just SO DIFFERENT. The writing in and of itself is tops, and I expect nothing less from Willis, but it took me a very long time to warm up to this novel, and the opening doesn't do the reader any favors: I honestly thought I'd jumped into the direct sequel of something else, so much so I had to go to Wikipedia and do some research to ease my mind. I'm still glad I read this, and as a lover of cats and dogs, I had plenty to keep me entertained with this book, which blends multiple genres beautifully, in such a way I'm not sure you could take out one element and still leave the book intact. Also, it has one of the most romantic lines in history (you'll have to click behind the cut to see it), and I love Willis for giving me that. I've got her latest, Blackout waiting on my shelf, and I look forward to seeing what it does, if anything, to unite the stand-alone novels in her time-traveling historians arc.
Review style: I'll talk about the trouble with time travel and how it can manipulate a story; how the book utilizes multiple genres and still comes out polished on the other end, the tone and humor and why Victorian settings tend not to do much for me, and why it helps to be an animal lover while reading. :) Spoilers? Yes.
The full review, which is at my LJ, also includes cover commentary and a further reading list, as well as a poll if you participated in the book club. As always, comments and discussion are most welcome! :)
REVIEW: Connie Willis's TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG
Happy Reading! :)
ALSO:
Book club selections @
calico_reaction. Hop on over! We'd love to have you!April: The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia
May: Natural History by Justina Robson