A few brief thoughts on Blackout by Connie Willis

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04:21 pm June 23rd, 2011

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			A few brief thoughts on Blackout by Connie Willis - Helen's journal and online home In which an old dog attempts to learn new tricks.

heleninwales


	A few brief thoughts on Blackout by Connie Willis
	Blackout by Connie Willis My rating: 3 of 5 stars I'll try and do a fuller review in due course when I've finished All Clear, but as most people seem to have found, there is too much rushing around like headless chickens at the start and the measles thing seems to be retreading old ground. Having said that, I did find it unputdownable. View all my reviews Current Mood: busy

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	From: lil_shepherd	Date: June 23rd, 2011 04:13 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I'm not going to try to read this. After seeing

drplokta's double review I know that, as an (adopted) Londoner of thirty years standing who did a lot of research on WW2 at one point, I would spend the whole thing nit-picking. Hell, I did that with Passage, and was so annoyed with The Doomsday Book that it hit the waste basket after a couple of chapters...

However, the books of hers that I like very much are ones where I know very little about the subject matter, and I am going to stick to those.

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	From: heleninwales	Date: June 24th, 2011 11:53 am (UTC)		(Link)

I probably didn't know enough about the history of the period to get annoyed by The Doomsday Book, but there are a lot of little slips in Blackout that would have been quickly picked up if a British person aged 55 plus had proofread it. I'm not enough of an expert on London to pick up mistakes there and anyway I do regard the whole thing as being set in a slight alternate history, why else would they lack mobile phones in the future Oxford? :)

Edited at 2011-06-24 11:54 am (UTC)

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From: coldhighmountai	Date: June 23rd, 2011 11:23 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I really liked Binnie and Alf. There must be a reason for this ;+)

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	From: heleninwales	Date: June 24th, 2011 11:50 am (UTC)		(Link)

They are wonderful characters and Connie Willis manages to get across their awfulness and also the poignancy of two young children being in such an desperate situation.

However, I have to admit that when Polly and Eileen first ended up in the same place, I had to concentrate on keeping them separate.

There are definitely good aspects to the book, but I wish that's a British person aged 55 plus had proof read it. There were quite a few annoying little slips that could easily have been corrected, like using a centigrade thermometer in the 1940s.

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