The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 19 January 2000
by Connie Willis
It is 2054, and time travel has become the realm of historians going back to check the record. Kivrin, a young woman at Oxford, is fascinated by the Middle Ages and finally manages to organize a visit to Christmas in the 1300s, a century formerly forbidden due to its terrible hazards. James Dunworthy, her adviser, is duly frightened by the prospect of sending this young woman into harm's way. She's heading to 1320, though, and the Black Death hadn't yet taken hold in England. Or had it? Just when she leaves, a modern-day plague hits Oxford, and a chaotic chain of events is set in motion when something goes terribly wrong with her trip into the past. Willis manages to permeate this story with tension and impatience. Though the reader may guess what has really happened, the confusion of characters, motives, and goals that she brings to life imbue the tale with anxiety. Kivrin finds beauty and horror in the fourteenth century. Dunworthy is left behind with a mystery and a tragedy unfolding around him. The two main characters are well-drawn and compassionate, while others are less so. Kivrin's visit to the past is terrifyingly well-told. There is a vivid and tragic sense of Time and its passing. It is an exciting, scary and sad story. Very good.
(Doomsday Book shared the 1993 Hugo award for best novel.)
Also by Connie Willis: [Passage] [To Say Nothing of the Dog]