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ernfrid's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
inspiring
reflective
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
timinbc's review against another edition
3.0
At 400 pages this might have been a good book. Darn it, I really liked Doomsday Book, but since then I’ve liked each of CW’s time travel books less.
It's ambitious, and obviously a lot of work went into it. But I think CW has over-reached.
I detested most of the characters. Sir Godfrey was consistently ridiculous, as much Don Quixote as anything else. Alf & Binnie were just Dennis the Menace on crack. The native-time Londoners were 100% stock character clichés, and the time travellers were all implausibly clueless fretters, despite being able to memorize in great detail all the bombing raids of the Blitz.
I really struggled through the middle parts, the hundreds of pages of people trying desperately to reach each other so they could not tell them things.
Sure, it lovingly describes life in London 1940-45. Great if it’s the first you’ve heard of it.
Sure, it’s a tribute to Agatha Christie’s complex plots. But some of it felt like complexity for the sake of complexity, not because the story demanded it. The basic rule of SF, or any SF, is to put believable characters in a believable (if unlikely) situation, then sit back and see what they do. This is more like watching puppets, and in too many cases we can see the puppeteer.
Don’t even get me started on the “Ernest” nonsense or the ludicrously-repeated mentions of the “Light of the World” picture.
Or why Polly was convinced they had “deadlines” and would die, or vanish or something, if they reached a time overlap. Perhaps it was in the earlier books, which I did read, but I don’t remember it.
I think I need to go and re-read some Kage Baker, or some of the earlier time travel stuff from Silverberg etc.
It's ambitious, and obviously a lot of work went into it. But I think CW has over-reached.
I detested most of the characters. Sir Godfrey was consistently ridiculous, as much Don Quixote as anything else. Alf & Binnie were just Dennis the Menace on crack. The native-time Londoners were 100% stock character clichés, and the time travellers were all implausibly clueless fretters, despite being able to memorize in great detail all the bombing raids of the Blitz.
I really struggled through the middle parts, the hundreds of pages of people trying desperately to reach each other so they could not tell them things.
Sure, it lovingly describes life in London 1940-45. Great if it’s the first you’ve heard of it.
Sure, it’s a tribute to Agatha Christie’s complex plots. But some of it felt like complexity for the sake of complexity, not because the story demanded it. The basic rule of SF, or any SF, is to put believable characters in a believable (if unlikely) situation, then sit back and see what they do. This is more like watching puppets, and in too many cases we can see the puppeteer.
Don’t even get me started on the “Ernest” nonsense or the ludicrously-repeated mentions of the “Light of the World” picture.
Or why Polly was convinced they had “deadlines” and would die, or vanish or something, if they reached a time overlap. Perhaps it was in the earlier books, which I did read, but I don’t remember it.
I think I need to go and re-read some Kage Baker, or some of the earlier time travel stuff from Silverberg etc.
tregina's review against another edition
3.0
I sat this one a little while before rating it, because I was very overwhelmed by the ending where everything did come together at last, in terrible and wonderful ways, but I didn't want to overlook the dissatisfaction that I was feeling before that point. It was both a blessing and a curse that I was (very) familiar with the previous books in this world; a blessing because it gave me a lot of context for the world they come from, which was lacking here, but a curse because I also knew firsthand that she could do better. That is not to say that I didn't enjoy the book(s), but when I look back from a distance of a couple of days, it becomes more and more clear that I never felt like I really got to know the main characters, who they are and where they come from. I got to know a lot about London during the war, and the detail about people's ordinary lives was wonderful and tremendous, but very little about the protagonists. Which is probably why I ultimately felt more emotionally connected to the people of the 1940s than the visitors from the 2060s.
przela71's review against another edition
4.0
I really liked this series and enjoyed the way that the story wrapped up.
trin's review against another edition
3.0
It is impossible to separate my thoughts on the first volume of this duology from the second—possibly because they never should have been separated in the first place. This is a single novel that got way, way out of control, and if Willis (or really, Willis’ editor, who’s supposed to be the responsible one in this case) had had any sense, this monstrosity of a manuscript would have been carefully pared down to one tighter, and much better, book. Where is Max Perkins when you need him?
So I’m not going to discuss the structural problems with these books in much greater detail: said problems are immense, and if you’re going to tackle this story, you have to accept going in that the first volume is entirely setup, and over-long setup at that. [b:Blackout|44128|Blackout|John J. Nance|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170250891s/44128.jpg|3102342] should have probably been the first hundred pages, maybe, of the overall work. All Clear, which contains—finally!—the resolution, is better, but even it took a good 300 pages to start getting anywhere. Willis has a definite style, but it can start to seem like a crutch, especially when there’s not much else going on. It got to the point where I began groaning every time I read “But she didn’t” or “But he didn’t”—just like I grit my teeth through all of [a:Tolkien|656983|J.R.R. Tolkien|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1199863358p2/656983.jpg]’s “And lo!” and “And behold!”s in [b:Return of the King|18512|The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings, #3)|J.R.R. Tolkien|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51RVpdArbXL._SL75_.jpg|2964424].
The characters’ worries and reasoning about whether or not they were screwing up the timeline were frustrating as well. There were far too many instances of them deciding that they had corrupted it—oh wait, no they hadn’t! (See, I swear, it wouldn’t have even been that hard to cut this.) And the actual solution...how was this a surprise? To ANY of them? Am I somehow wrong in thinking that “the time traveler’s actions are and always were part of the timeline” is one of the major theories of how time travel would work? They use it on Doctor Who and Supernatural all the time. Willis’ Oxford books take place in the future, and I’d think that, even if this is a future where time travel has proved possible and this particular theory of time travel has supposedly been disproved, the characters would at least be aware of it. They’ve got a good century of pop culture behind them to make use of, after all! But instead, they’re totally shocked by the possibility, like people in modern zombie films who are totally taken aback by the revelation that a bite means you’re a ticking zombie time bomb. This just makes the characters seem really alarmingly thick.
So far, I’m making it sound like these books totally aren’t worth reading at all, but this isn’t entirely true. They fail on a number of levels, but Willis succeeds on a number of others, too—just to confuse you, I guess. Her depiction of the Blitz is fantastic and brilliantly vivid: as a story of ordinary people pulling together in impossible circumstances, these books are powerful and believable. The characters, once you work through their multiple aliases (very confusing over two books) and get over the fact that they all seem to process information in a startlingly similar way (“But he didn’t”)—they are characters to root for. Both Colin and Sir Godfrey are divine romantic heroes, and Willis, as usual, knows how to tug on your heartstrings, to write sacrifices so they feel painful and fully-realized. Once I got over the 300-page hump, I zipped through the second half of All Clear in an afternoon because I needed to know what happened to everyone. There is something here, to be sure—a spark of a good novel—which in a way makes it even more of a shame that it’s buried under so much excess stuff. Oh, Max, Max: we need to invent time travel for you.
So I’m not going to discuss the structural problems with these books in much greater detail: said problems are immense, and if you’re going to tackle this story, you have to accept going in that the first volume is entirely setup, and over-long setup at that. [b:Blackout|44128|Blackout|John J. Nance|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170250891s/44128.jpg|3102342] should have probably been the first hundred pages, maybe, of the overall work. All Clear, which contains—finally!—the resolution, is better, but even it took a good 300 pages to start getting anywhere. Willis has a definite style, but it can start to seem like a crutch, especially when there’s not much else going on. It got to the point where I began groaning every time I read “But she didn’t” or “But he didn’t”—just like I grit my teeth through all of [a:Tolkien|656983|J.R.R. Tolkien|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1199863358p2/656983.jpg]’s “And lo!” and “And behold!”s in [b:Return of the King|18512|The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings, #3)|J.R.R. Tolkien|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51RVpdArbXL._SL75_.jpg|2964424].
The characters’ worries and reasoning about whether or not they were screwing up the timeline were frustrating as well. There were far too many instances of them deciding that they had corrupted it—oh wait, no they hadn’t! (See, I swear, it wouldn’t have even been that hard to cut this.) And the actual solution...how was this a surprise? To ANY of them? Am I somehow wrong in thinking that “the time traveler’s actions are and always were part of the timeline” is one of the major theories of how time travel would work? They use it on Doctor Who and Supernatural all the time. Willis’ Oxford books take place in the future, and I’d think that, even if this is a future where time travel has proved possible and this particular theory of time travel has supposedly been disproved, the characters would at least be aware of it. They’ve got a good century of pop culture behind them to make use of, after all! But instead, they’re totally shocked by the possibility, like people in modern zombie films who are totally taken aback by the revelation that a bite means you’re a ticking zombie time bomb. This just makes the characters seem really alarmingly thick.
So far, I’m making it sound like these books totally aren’t worth reading at all, but this isn’t entirely true. They fail on a number of levels, but Willis succeeds on a number of others, too—just to confuse you, I guess. Her depiction of the Blitz is fantastic and brilliantly vivid: as a story of ordinary people pulling together in impossible circumstances, these books are powerful and believable. The characters, once you work through their multiple aliases (very confusing over two books) and get over the fact that they all seem to process information in a startlingly similar way (“But he didn’t”)—they are characters to root for. Both Colin and Sir Godfrey are divine romantic heroes, and Willis, as usual, knows how to tug on your heartstrings, to write sacrifices so they feel painful and fully-realized. Once I got over the 300-page hump, I zipped through the second half of All Clear in an afternoon because I needed to know what happened to everyone. There is something here, to be sure—a spark of a good novel—which in a way makes it even more of a shame that it’s buried under so much excess stuff. Oh, Max, Max: we need to invent time travel for you.
jputzi's review against another edition
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
5.0
tosta's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
klparmley's review against another edition
4.0
I want to read this series again, knowing who I will see again later.
julowe's review against another edition
4.0
A decent historical fiction novel. The dithering characters are frustrating, setting up a false tension - 'will they succeed despite themselves?' vs succeeding against circumstances.