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Doomsday Book
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DB: Damn You Connie Willis! (spoilers)
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Sorry. I Lem'd this book. I couldn't get more Than halfway thought it. She went to the same well too many times on what the problem was and not giving answers. I did not finish it, but I guess the main character is responsible for bringing the plague to that time period.
Steve wrote: "One of the techniques used by Penn and Teller when doing a magic trick with live animals is to make the audience fall in love with the animal before they do something horrible to it. Sometimes it e..."I thought Willis did a great job with this aspect of DB. It's one thing to read history about the plague, about how one-third of the population died. But Willis helped us to come a bit closer to living the tragedy through the eyes of Kivrin. It made me appreciate a bit more what those people had to endure.
Bruce wrote: "Steve wrote: "One of the techniques used by Penn and Teller when doing a magic trick with live animals is to make the audience fall in love with the animal before they do something horrible to it. ..."I thought that was effective. I got to care about the characters and what it must have felt like to deal with a disease they didn't understand, the confusion and the superstition. (view spoiler)
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Tassie Dave, S&L Historian
(last edited Nov 24, 2017 12:24PM)
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rated it 3 stars
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No, She wasn't. She was ill with the sickness from the future, but the people of that time period were immune from that illness for reasons that are explained. (view spoiler)
She couldn't have brought it anyway. Connie's convoluted rules, that don't allow Paradoxes that will change or affect history, wouldn't have let her enter that time period.
The plague came from Asia. Kivrin arrives many years after the plague started and after it has already reached that part of England.
Sorry. The writing was extremely annoying to me. I couldn’t stand the constant “there’s a problem, but I won’t tell you what it is” writing. I tried to push through, but that ruined the story. Plus I will now cry shenanigans that those people were immune from that disease she brought back. I’m even more glad that I Lem’d it now knowing that. That would have made me mad to have to make the assumption that these people would have been immune just because it was present in a tomb from before that time period. Especially with how slow it travelled through the more modern and crowded populace of the future. Shennanigans.
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The problem does get resolved. That's the end of the book.
Willis had a somewhat easier task in that the villagers and nobility are human (and not much of our behavioral essence really changes) so there is a natural empathy. At the same time, we know inherently that since these people are from the 14th century, they're dead anyway, so why care?
So she (view spoiler)[goes through the steps of showing these people as being very human with their own faults and virtues. She slides Kivrin naturally into the role of a nanny for Agnes and an older sister/aunt/mentor for Rosemond when she sees how awful she feels about being betrothed. We learn to like the contemps in their humbleness. This is put into stark contrast with the most of the modern characters, many of whom are petty and unlikable.
When she killed off the entire village one at a time, each one hurt and I felt Kivrin's panic when she realized that the scribe had Bubonic plague. I thought Rosemond would recover, but nope. I thought that Father Roche would survive, but not only did he die last, we had the revelation for how truly noble he was. He never shirked in his duties, in spite of Lady Eilwys' nitpicking. This could in part be because he believed that Kivrin was sent to him by God, but still. The story did not end the way that I was expecting, but that's for another thread. (hide spoiler)]