Thursday, November 4, 2010

61. Blackout - redux

By:  Connie Willis
Rated 5 Stars
Format:  Audio Book

This was a do over for me.  Here is my review from when I read it back in April.

My original review of Blackout

It was immediately evident to me that 1.) I read on an entirely different level than I listen, and 2.) mood plays a huge part in how I feel about a book when I read it.

There are so many characters at the beginning, that it's hard to keep them straight. The reader/listener is getting the viewpoints of three main characters, historians Polly, Eileen and Mike, all time traveling to WWII England for first person experiences during the London Blitz.  Polly as a shop clerk in London during the Blitz, Eileen as a maid in the north of England to observe child evacuees from London, and Mike to Dover to observe ships returning from the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk. They all worry incessantly about every thing they do and whether what they've done has changed history.  This got so tiresome that if this had been a book I probably would have wall banged it at least once.  I would have picked it back up and continued to read it though. :) Also the number of obstacles the characters encountered every time they tried to so something felt contrived.   However . . .

But I gave a 5 star rating on this journal for my reread that was AFTER I real the sequel (?) All Clear.  These books do not stand alone.  It is all one book and Blackout ends in the middle of the story.  At the end of All Clear things made sense that annoyed the heck out of me in Blackout although I still thought that the characters agonized to much over every little thing they said or did.

These are great books but the plot is very complicated and multi layered.  Be warned.

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