Book Review: Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

I had first heard about Connie Willis from a Hugo award she won for Blackout/All Clear. I knew it was time travel novel but never picked it up. A friend from work, however, strongly recommended her books and lent me her copy of Doomsday Book, which won the Hugo and Nebula awards. And what a ride it has been! This book was not what I expected and ended up being a really good read. Here's the blurb:

For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.
But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin -- barely of age herself -- finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history's darkest hours.
Five years in the writing by one of science fiction's most honored authors, Doomsday Book is a storytelling triumph. Connie Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering and the indomitable will of the human spirit.

Read on for my full review.

Overall Impression
This was a great book. I didn't know what to expect at first, but I was hooked from the start thanks to cleverly teasing out what was going on slowly. I kept trying to figure out what was going to happen next and predict how things would go, only to be proven wrong with surprising twists. The book features some interesting characters, a fast plot, and an intriguing world of time travel. The parallels between the future, the past, and the real-world present just made the book more enjoyable and relatable.

Plot
The plot follows the two main characters, Mr. Dunworthy and Kivrin, as they prepare for a 'drop', a time travel operation. Kivrin is to go back in time to 1320 medieval England and Dunworthy has been training her and helping her prepare. After the drop, it's a tense time as things start to go wrong in both the past and the future timelines. With things going wrong, it's not clear how safe Kivrin is or whether Dunworthy will even be able to bring her back.

The book opens up rather quickly and maintains a fast pace throughout most of it. It goes back and forth between the two timelines and also has brief sections where we see the audio recordings that Kivrin has been doing, as a sort of summary of events. It's very well executed, though at times we switch timelines just as a cliffhanger revelation or event has taken place!

Characters
We follow two main characters in a pair of timelines. In the future, we have Mr. Dunworthy, who knows quite a bit about time travel and medieval Europe and is trying to keep things running smoothly even though he is technically not in charge of the operation (much to his frustration). In the past, we have Kivrin, a young woman eager to go to medieval England and who finally achieves her dream of time travel. There are also plenty of other characters in both timelines. Some are cool and likable, but a choice few are simply exasperating!

Setting / World Building
This is a time travel novel so we get to see some of how it works, though not in any significant level of detail. We just know that it's a bit imprecise and there are physical laws that prevent paradoxes from happening, including the possibility of changing the past. The imprecise nature of it is a constant plot point in the first part of the novel, since it's not clear exactly *when* Kivrin has traveled back to. She was set to go back to 1320, but since the Black Death reached that area in 1348, several of the characters are worried the 'slippage' in time may be large enough to encompass that time.

Naturally, there is also a huge part of the book that is set in the past, in a small medieval village outside of Oxford. It's very interesting to see the daily lives of these folks, to see the differences in their language, and yet to also see how similar their lives and interests are. For example, one of the young girls is roughly 5 and she behaves pretty much like any 5 year-old would today. A common concern for Kivrin is the hygiene, or lack thereof, of the people around her. Modern medicine had not been invented yet, after all, and even though the Black Death and the variants of the plague are far away, it's still a concern for her.

One aspect of the modern time that tripped me up was the colloquialisms being used. I've never been to the UK so the terminology used by the characters is frequently odd, though a quick google search gave me the American equivalents. That being said, some of setting here is projections into a future 2050 from when the novel was written (1990s) and so there are a few things that are unexpected (no one seems to have a cellphone, for example), though they at least serve to drive up the tension.

Final Thoughts
As my first foray into books by Connie Willis, I am sold. This book was incredible and, in hindsight, well deserving of the awards it has earned. I like how real the characters were, including the ones I hated. The plot kept me glued to the story and there is some clever foreshadowing and misdirection going on that kept me guessing what was going to happen all the way to the end. I was so intrigued by the story that I did my own quick Google searches at some of the topics and even had a dream of an ending before I finished the book (though not of the *actual* ending). I highly recommend this book and will look forward to reading her other time travel books.