All Clear

I read Blackout and All Clear a few months apart, and I wish I'd read them back to back, since they flow seamlessly. In general, I wish that an editor could have removed a few hundred pages and made one book. Connie Willis spent an awful amount of time writting about her characters' endless near-misses and endless musings about failed drops. These books were page turners, though, and I kept at it even when I found myself skimming through repetitive conversations.

The amount of research put into this book lends a realism that kept me reading on. I quite enjoyed the characters, the action scenes and the multiple narratives. Shifting around the mant time settings and the unique name changes for each character during each time made me confused to who's storyline I was following. Connie eventually used this to her advantage in allowing the discovery of plot lines develop over time.

The twists were clever, I could not have predicted several developments, and I appreciated how she expanded on ideas about the universe that she had not in Domesday Book. This duo of books is a far more advanced adventure into time travel and worth reading.