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All Clear
- Narrated by: Katherine Kellgren, Connie Willis (introduction)
- Length: 23 hrs and 41 mins
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Publisher's summary
In Blackout, award-winning author Connie Willis returned to the time-traveling future of 2060, the setting for several of her most celebrated works, and sent three Oxford historians to World War II England: Michael Davies, intent on observing heroism during the Miracle of Dunkirk; Merope Ward, studying children evacuated from London; and Polly Churchill, posing as a shopgirl in the middle of the Blitz. But when the three become unexpectedly trapped in 1940, they struggle not only to find their way home but to survive as Hitler's bombers attempt to pummel London into submission.
Now the situation has grown even more dire. Small discrepancies in the historical record seem to indicate that one or all of them have somehow affected the past, changing the outcome of the war. The belief that the past can be observed but never altered has always been a core belief of time-travel theory, but suddenly it seems that the theory is horribly, tragically wrong.
Meanwhile, in 2060 Oxford, the historians' supervisor, Mr. Dunworthy, and 17-year-old Colin Templer, who nurses a powerful crush on Polly, are engaged in a frantic and seemingly impossible struggle of their own - to find three missing needles in the haystack of history.
Told with compassion, humor, and an artistry both uplifting and devastating, All Clear is more than just the triumphant culmination of the adventure that began with Blackout. It's Connie Willis' most humane, heartfelt novel yet - a clear-eyed celebration of faith, love, and the quiet, ordinary acts of heroism and sacrifice too often overlooked by history.
BONUS AUDIO: Includes an introduction written and read by author Connie Willis.
Critic reviews
- Nebula Award, Best Novel, 2010
- Hugo Award, Best Novel, 2011
- Best SF and Fantasy Books of 2010: Readers' Choice (SF Site)
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- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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British airman Dym Ingleford is convinced that the young German prisoner, Max Eckermann, is his brother Anthony, who was kidnapped years before. Raised in the Nazi ideology, Tony has by chance tumbled into British hands. Dym has brought him back, at least temporarily, to the family he neither remembers nor will acknowledge as his own.
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More people should read this wonderful story!!!
- By E.F.B. on 08-02-18
By: Constance Savery
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The Quiet American
- By: Graham Greene
- Narrated by: Joseph Porter
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Alden Pyle, an idealistic young American, is sent to Vietnam to promote democracy amidst the intrigue and violence of the French war with the Vietminh, while his friend, Fowler, a cynical foreign correspondent, looks on.
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Terrible narrator nearly derails Greene novel.
- By Richard on 07-12-12
By: Graham Greene
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Dead Man's Land
- By: Robert Ryan
- Narrated by: Richard Burnip
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Deep in the trenches of Flanders Fields, men are dying in the thousands every day. So one more death shouldn't be a surprise. But then a body turns up with bizarre injuries, and Sherlock Holmes' former sidekick, Dr. John Watson - unable to fight for his country due to injury but able to serve it through his medical expertise - finds his suspicions raised.
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Watson is wonderful, amid very grim surroundings
- By L. Gutman on 03-01-18
By: Robert Ryan
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Evans Above
- By: Rhys Bowen
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 6 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Evan Evans is a young police constable who has traded in the violence of city life for idyllic Llanfair, a Welsh village tucked far away from trouble. Nestled among the Snowdonia mountain range, Llanfair looks to Constable Evans like a town forgotten by time, but he quickly learns that even the bucolic countryside has its share of eccentric - and deadly - characters.
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Interesting....
- By brian on 01-22-17
By: Rhys Bowen
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The Irish Inheritance
- Jayne Sinclair Genealogical Mystery Series, Book 1
- By: M. J. Lee
- Narrated by: Lucy Rayner
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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July 8, 1921. Ireland. A British Officer is shot dead on a remote hillside south of Dublin. November 22, 2015. United Kingdom. Former police detective Jayne Sinclair, now working as a genealogical investigator, receives a phone call from an adopted American billionaire asking her to discover the identity of his real father. How are the two events linked? Jayne Sinclair has only three clues to help her: a photocopied birth certificate, a stolen book, and an old photograph.
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Why the foul language?
- By Tim Delaney on 06-19-17
By: M. J. Lee
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Raven's Gate
- The Gatekeepers, Book 1
- By: Anthony Horowitz
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Matt is being punished for a crime he saw, but didn't commit. Instead of being locked up, he is being sent to the middle of nowhere to live with a new foster mom, as part of a government scheme called The Leaf Project. But Matt's new home provides anything but peace and quiet. His new guardian is involved in very sinister things, and the whole town seems to be on her side. The truth is much bigger than Matt or the town, but Matt is the only person who can stop the ultimate evil from being unleashed.
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Measured success
- By Jay Kuykendall on 06-26-07
By: Anthony Horowitz
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Nocturne
- By: Diane Armstrong
- Narrated by: Deidre Rubenstein
- Length: 16 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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It is Warsaw, 1939, and Elzunia is an indulged teenager who longs for a heroic life filled with romance. But the outbreak of war shatters all her dreams. As bombs fall, she meets Adam, a taciturn airman whose fate becomes entwined with hers. In despair over the occupation, Adam joins the Polish resistance, then flies bombers for the RAF.
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Blech
- By Caroline H. on 02-20-11
By: Diane Armstrong
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Down Cemetery Road
- By: Mick Herron
- Narrated by: Julia Franklin
- Length: 13 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
When a house explodes in a quiet Oxford suburb and a young girl disappears in the aftermath, Sarah Tucker becomes obsessed with finding her. Accustomed to dull chores in a childless household and hosting her husband’s wearisome business clients for dinner, Sarah suddenly finds herself questioning everything she thought she knew, as her investigation reveals that people long believed dead are still among the living, while the living are fast joining the dead.
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Not as good as Slough House
- By wisconsinclark on 08-09-20
By: Mick Herron
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Ghost Station
- By: Dan Wells
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Original Recording
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Ghost Station is a tense thriller about espionage, cryptography, and paranoia, set in the earliest days of the Berlin Wall. Can Reed trust Longshore? His boss? His lover? Can he find the truth behind the lies - or will Berlin become ground zero for a world-ending war?
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Ghost Station pulls you in from the beginning
- By Kurt Petrey on 11-08-19
By: Dan Wells
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Secrets of a Charmed Life
- By: Susan Meissner
- Narrated by: Alana Kerr Collins
- Length: 11 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Current day, Oxford, England. Young American scholar Kendra Van Zant, eager to pursue her vision of a perfect life, interviews Isabel McFarland just when the elderly woman is ready to give up secrets about the war that she has kept for decades...beginning with who she really is. What Kendra receives from Isabel is both a gift and a burden--one that will test her convictions and her heart.
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Rare 5-Star Across the Board!
- By Imamomof4 on 06-14-15
By: Susan Meissner
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It doesn't work like that.
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Connie Willis must be really losing it
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Tunnel, bright light, an NDE or something else?
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It doesn't work like that.
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Passed the betchel test
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Good story, HORRENDOUS narration.
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For Jeff Johnston, a young historical researcher for a Civil War novelist, reality is redefined on a bitter cold night near the close of a lingering winter. He meets Annie, an intense and lovely young woman suffering from vivid, intense nightmares. Haunted by the dreamer and her unrelenting dreams, Jeff leads Annie on an emotional odyssey through the heartland of the Civil War in search of a cure. On long-silenced battlefields their relationship blossoms—two obsessed lovers linked by unbreakable chains of history, torn by a duty that could destroy them both.
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Good story, unfortunate narration
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Spin
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Story
One night when he was 10, Tyler stood in his backyard and watched the stars go out. They flared into brilliance, then disappeared, replaced by an empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.
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Great Listen!
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The Best of Connie Willis
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Here are the greatest stories of one of the greatest writers working in any genre today. All ten of the stories gathered here are Hugo or Nebula award winners - some even have the distinction of winning both. With a new Introduction by the author and personal afterwords to each story, plus a special look at three of Willis' unique public speeches - this is unquestionably the collection of the season, an audiobook that every Connie Willis fan will treasure.
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An index for locating stories
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Everyone knew the legend of Christopher Sim. Fighter. Leader. An interstellar hero with a rare talent for war, Sim changed mankind's history forever when he forged a ragtag group of misfits into the weapon that broke the back of the alien Ashiyyur. But now, Alex Benedict has found a startling bit of information, long buried in an ancient computer file. If it is true, then Christopher Sim was a fraud.
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Very good - but the cover and title are deceptive
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By: Jack McDevitt
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The Windup Girl
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Performance
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Story
Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko...Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; instead, she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman.
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Good and also Frustrating
- By txkimmers on 11-16-09
By: Paolo Bacigalupi
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The Hallowed Hunt
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The half-mad Prince Boleso has been slain by a noblewoman he had intended to defile. It falls to Lord Ingrey kin Wilfcliff to transport the prince to his burial place and to bring the accused killer, Lady Ijada, to judgment. The road he travels with his burden and his prisoner is fraught with danger. But in the midst of political chaos, magic has the fiercer hold on Ingrey's destiny, and Ijada herself may turn out to be the only one he dares trust.
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Extremely disappointing
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Rainbows End
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Set a few decades from now, Rainbows End is an epic adventure that encapsulates in a single extended family the challenges of the technological advances of the first quarter of the 21st century. The information revolution of the past 30 years blossoms into a web of conspiracies that could destroy Western civilization. At the center of the action is Robert Gu, a former Alzheimer's victim who has regained his mental and physical health through radical new therapies, and his family.
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Great Discovery
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A Song for a New Day
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In the Before, when the government didn't prohibit large public gatherings, Luce Cannon was on top of the world. One of her songs had just taken off and she was on her way to becoming a star. Now, in the After, terror attacks and deadly viruses have led the government to ban concerts, and Luce's connection to the world - her music, her purpose - is closed off forever. She does what she has to do: She performs in illegal concerts to a small but passionate community, always evading the law.
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Amazingly Prescient & Heartfelt
- By Lisa Davidson on 09-07-20
By: Sarah Pinsker
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Stations of the Tide
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Story
The Jubilee Tides will drown the continents of the planet Miranda beneath the weight of her own oceans. But as the once-in-two-centuries cataclysm approaches, an even greater catastrophe threatens this dark and dangerous planet of tale-spinners, conjurers, and shapechangers. From author Michael Swanwick—one of the most brilliantly assured and darkly inventive writers of contemporary fiction—comes a masterwork of radically altered realities and world-shattering seductions.
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Hard to categorize, hard to put down
- By Robert L. on 03-25-12
By: Michael Swanwick
What listeners say about All Clear
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Saikungbob
- 11-03-10
joint review for Blackout and All Clear
I've listened to a number of Connie Willis' books before and really enjoyed them. My experience with these two books was decidedly more mixed. Much was very enjoyable; however, I got sick of the interminable self-recriminations about whether one action or another had changed history. Also, one character or another would go haring off on some errand and immediately the others would wonder why he/she was late in returning despite the fact that all their experience told them that delays in travel in war disrupted England were business as usual. It also seems to me that time travelers would have standard strategies for making it easy for their retrieval teams to find them. Gawd! Don't we tell our kids to either stay put or go to some previously specified place if lost. These people would have made the task of finding them very difficult indeed.
I guess the main complaint is that the same two or three devices were used to excess. This is one book (or rather one pair of books -- they must be reviewed together as they aren't stand alone books) that lends itself to abridgement -- and I don't listen to or read abridged books! There are extremely tedious passages as they moan about whether or not they have changed history by some action forgetting, of course, that not acting can have ramifications, too.
Still Ms Willis paints a wonderful picture of war time England with only a few major historical mistakes.
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45 people found this helpful
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- Mike From Mesa
- 12-05-11
Rescued by the second half
Blackout and All Clear really constitute a single book. Blackout leaves the reader without any resolution and All Clear has no back story (and hence makes no sense) without Blackout. Ms Willis, in the introduction to All Clear, says as much. However this review is only for All Clear.
Ms Willis seems to have had the goal of telling the story of the British civilian population during World War II and especially during the Blitz and to have used the characters in the book as the vehicle for doing so. In this she has succeeded brilliantly. Although I have read many books about World War II none have really told the story of the British civilians and how they coped with the violence and devastation of the war and especially what living through the Blitz was like. I have a much better idea of what people had to go through as part of their daily lives and what just getting through the day must have been like.
The main characters, however, seem like terribly flawed individuals. They are supposed to be professional historians but act as though they are continually on the edge of panic. At every step they make the wrong choices and assume the absolute worst about what is happening around them. During the hours of listening I wanted to just tell them to "get a grip" and stop acting so stupidly. I was going to title this review "Historians acting stupidly" or "These are professionals?", but the second half of All Clear, where Ms Willis began to put the pieces of the puzzle together, was so well done that I felt the book was rescued from a 3 star rating.
The narration was very well done with many characters having such distinctive voices that I could tell who was speaking without having to be told.
I would recommend this book with the caveat that the reader might want to listen to the two parts of the book separately. Together they are 41 1/2 hours and that was just too much of these characters for me to listen to at one time. Perhaps if I had separated the two parts of the book I would have had more patience with the characters. As it was I ended up having to stop listening to All Clear about half way through and read an entirely different book before I was able to go back to All Clear and finish it. Still, having said that, I must credit Ms Willis with enough misdirection to credit Agatha Christie (who makes a cameo) appearance in this book.
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27 people found this helpful
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- Annie
- 11-08-10
Satisfying ending to the story
I enjoyed hearing how things work out for our heroes and found the ending satisfying. And as with Blackout, the details of wartime London and environs make for interesting listening.
However, this book is easily 25% longer than it needs to be. The early and middle parts are filled with loooong passages in which our heroes agonize over the things they are keeping from one another. After a while, this made me nuts and I wanted to scream at them to stop lying or at least stop ruminating on these lies and just move on already.
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- Susan
- 03-18-12
I don't understand how these novels won any awards
If you want a semi-documentary history of WWII London Blitz seen from the point of view of three fictional characters, please read this book.
IF you want a tightly paced, suspenseful novel full of sympathetic, engaging characters trapped in history (as in her previous Doomsday Book), do not read these books.
I loved the previous Oxford Time Travel Historian novels, and was strongly looking forward to the release of these two. I purchased them both before even reading the first one.
They fail miserably as stories. The characters, supposedly intelligent, highly trained time traveling historians, act like idiots with no common sense. The plot is meandering The point of view switches back and forth between characters and timelines and was completely confusing. Entire chapters could have been totally excised with no loss to the plot. She could easily have compacted both books into one. A fabulous, tightly woven, suspenseful novel would have resulted. THAT one I could see winning an award. I'm not sure where all the favorable reviews are coming from. I finished Blackout from sheer perseverance and reluctance to waste so many invested hours without reaching the end, plus I am an inveterate optimist. I could not summon the enthusiasm to read AllClear.
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Overall
- Richard
- 01-25-11
Wake me when its over
I loved Doomsday Book. Loved it. One of my favorite books of all time.
I enjoyed Black Out.. mostly. Until it abruptly ended halfway through the story line (about the time I started getting bored) and told me to "tune in next week". So I did. Silly me.
All clear was boring from the first line until the point about four hours in when I said "enough!".
The characters are petty, unbelievable, and one dimensional. Their silly daily dramas aren't interesting enough to engage a sewing circle, and the main characters behave like school children. Their dilemmas and schemes are recycled over and over and over-- like from all the back in Doomsday Book. (How many drops have been obliterated or just misplaced... really?) And then they went on and on and on and on, and around and around and around....
The random second chapter where we skip to the end goes beyond foreshadowing to just plain spoiler, and was really just thrown in all slapdash like it was a horrible printing error that just stuck the end in the beginning.
The mythology fell off the rails back in Blackout and is only getting further into the mud in All Clear, in Doomsday, it worked b/c the mythology wasn't the point of the story. But in Blackout/All Clear it has become integral to the story, and now all of its unexplained, unrealistic, quasi-magical, dysfunctional quirks are in the spotlight.
Overall, it had less depth and attention to detail than a piece of flash fiction. Essentially, its an amazing historical account of an often glossed over experience, with some really annoying characters with no direction and even less of a clue getting in the way. Willis is typically a great writer, it just seems like she didn't care this time around, or got lost in research.
Sorry to Alf and Binny, they were the only ones I liked in the end, and would have liked to see what became of them.
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- Sohachi
- 12-21-13
30 hours of great material presented in 50 hours
I really liked the characters in this book. We came to know and care about many of the people stuck in the London blitz. There was a lot of excellent history, and I think the author did a fabulous job letting us experience the terror of constant bombing, the privation of constant rationing and the courage shown by much of the population.
The cutting back and forth between different centuries and different locations was a little harder to follow in an audiobook than in print.
What made me subtract a star from the overall score was the constant repetition of the same themes - "I'm stuck, no one can rescue me", "I may have changed history" and "I'm not going to tell my friends what's really going on because I don't want them to worry."
The six parts that make up the two books in this series were probably twice as long as they needed to be.
I'm no stranger to, or enemy of, extremely long books, but I do want the story to keep moving. The same thoughts kept running through the characters' heads, and it was tiresome to hear them over and over.
We also got to hear slightly humorous or sarcastic thoughts, almost never voiced, which was also annoying. One character might say, "That's a dangerous job" and another would think "Not as dangerous as rescuing prisoners from Dunkirk".
I wondered why the characters couldn't occasionally voice their thoughts. It also occurred to me that characters, like people, probably only think interesting thoughts a small percentage of the time. Listening to every boring thought that anyone might have in a day is almost torture.
Perhaps this review is more negative than I intend, but I like Connie Willis' work in general, and I liked the characters and theme of this book. If the redundant thoughts were eliminated, I think this would be a great read for lovers of history, sci-fi fans and those looking for an exciting listen.
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- Lisa
- 08-02-11
Blackout and All Clear
This is a joint review of Blackout and All Clear. They must be considered together as one long novel, as neither one can stand alone. Basically, the books are follow the same concept as "Doomsday Book" and 'To Say Nothing of the Dog", where in 2060 time travel exists, and Oxford University sends historians back in time to observe. Here, our historians are visiting various destinations in World War II, but mostly in London during the Blitz. The length allows the author to pull you deeply into the story and the setting, You really get a sense of what it must have been like to fall asleep in the shelter or the tube station at night listening to the bombs, and then surface in the morning, stop at home if you're lucky (and if your home was still standing) and hurry off to work despite the destruction in whatever neighborhood was hit the night before. I was moved by the story, and I've been drawn into learning more about the Blitz due to this novel. The characters are not perfect. Yes, they sometimes whine, or make foolish choices, or hide things from others that they should reveal. However, they are caught up in a terrifying situation and can be forgiven their mistakes. Connie Willis' time travelling setting needs to be your cup of tea. If you don't want to hear anything about time travel, this is not for you. There is also a "comedy of errors" aspect, involving misunderstanding, mistaken identity, just missing someone at a critical moment, or being delayed at an inconvenient time. It happens a lot, and some people find this repetition annoying. I find it amusing, at least the way Willis does it. For instance, they have time travel in 2060 but no cell phones, so in Oxford there's a lot of running around trying to find people who are running around trying to find other people. You also meet a lot of characters and you don't know where they fit in. You just have to lose yourself in the setting. For most of the second book, I could not put it down. Well worth the credits.
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- Gabriel
- 10-21-10
This is the 2nd book of a series.
This is the 2nd book of a series. the 1st book of teh series is blackout.
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- Leo W. Buss
- 11-03-10
Tedious in the extreme
Mindnumbingly repetitive. This author has been done a profound disservice by her publisher - there is no evidence that any effort was expended in editing the text.
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- Aser Tolentino
- 05-01-12
A Comedy Certainly, but How Very Tragic...
After finishing the book, I had to look up the classification referenced in the title of the review. I won't spoil the scene from which it comes; but I think it applies to the book as well as the subject of the conversation. It is that conversation among others, towards the end of the book that leads me to rate All Clear and Blackout as 5s, regardless of their shortcomings. Given that Blackout isn't even a complete novel, this should say something to you.
I was a bit taken aback by the radiant praise heaped upon Ms. Willis's writing when I glanced over the publisher's summary while waiting for the book to download. I mean sure, I'd been enthralled enough by the characters and world of Blackout to forge on (I'd bought the book long ago and just had to download it) but seriously, "uplifting and devastating?" Well, regardless of whatever else I might have thought then, the acclaim is worth it. This book brings to life the struggles of ordinary people by contrasting them with very extraordinary observers trapped by a very different sort of peril than the blitz. The author also uses time travel as a means to depict the depth of love represented by truly selfless sacrifice in entirely amazing ways. It is one thing to give one's life in a spontaneous act, quite another to devote what might very well be the rest of your life engaged in mundane tasks seeking the rescue of a friend you might, and probably will, never see again. At the same time, along with the time travelers, the reader meets any number of people "doing their bit," by putting out fires, decoding German messages, driving ambulances, putting on silly shows, and raising other people's children. Many characters embody a spirit that is often ridiculed or exploited, and through the magic of Ms. Willis's words, bring out its power and beauty.
There are a great many scenes in which characters deliberate, perhaps overly much, on the unique pitfalls of their situation, but I think it's generally relevant to the story, despite its repetitiveness. I also think it unfair to the characters to dwell overly much on how often they worry about delayed arrivals, given the very uncertain dangers and the singular nature of the people involved, the only person who knows who you really are is going out into a city regularly beset by aerial bombardment on top of every conceivable "normal" hazard of urban life; I actually worried every time the characters separated.
I've come to think of the degree to which I miss the characters of a story as a measure of just how much I enjoyed it; I think I'll be carrying around memories of Polly and Merope's triumphs and tragedies with me for quite a long while.
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