![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I'll cut to the chase. Read this book!
The slightly longer version: Passage counts barely if at all as SF, so if you're a hard-core SF fan, don't say I didn't warn you. But it is a beautiful, wonderful book that I couldn't put down.
I read the first couple hundred pages and really liked it, but it was the last, oh, five hundred pages that really grabbed me. I read fanfic this way (all at once) and Fairly Potted and the Ominous Noun Phrase, but I don't normally read novels this way; I prefer to savor them, reading a bit at a time, turning them over in my head, over the course of a few days or several days. I'd have stayed up late to finish this book. I'd have skipped work. Fortunately, I didn't have to, but you might want to plan your own schedules accordingly. : )
Connie Willis is a great writer. I can't recommend her Doomsday Book highly enough; I am an actual medievalist, so an awful lot of historical fiction and time travel SF just leave me cold (or hot and bothered, complaining bitterly). Passage is a bit like Willis's Bellwether in that there's little that counts as SF, but it's more like Doomsday Book in its seriousness and tone. Not a light novel, Passage introduces us to a psychologist and then a neurologist studying near-death experiences. Death hangs over the novel from the very beginning. If the prospects of dying and loss bother you intensely, don't read it.
Otherwise, do read it. Her characters are marvelously real. A lot of research informs the book but never drives it; I learned from it, but I didn't feel I'd ever been lectured (well, except for one annoying character--who annoys most of the other characters, much like real life).
The slightly longer version: Passage counts barely if at all as SF, so if you're a hard-core SF fan, don't say I didn't warn you. But it is a beautiful, wonderful book that I couldn't put down.
I read the first couple hundred pages and really liked it, but it was the last, oh, five hundred pages that really grabbed me. I read fanfic this way (all at once) and Fairly Potted and the Ominous Noun Phrase, but I don't normally read novels this way; I prefer to savor them, reading a bit at a time, turning them over in my head, over the course of a few days or several days. I'd have stayed up late to finish this book. I'd have skipped work. Fortunately, I didn't have to, but you might want to plan your own schedules accordingly. : )
Connie Willis is a great writer. I can't recommend her Doomsday Book highly enough; I am an actual medievalist, so an awful lot of historical fiction and time travel SF just leave me cold (or hot and bothered, complaining bitterly). Passage is a bit like Willis's Bellwether in that there's little that counts as SF, but it's more like Doomsday Book in its seriousness and tone. Not a light novel, Passage introduces us to a psychologist and then a neurologist studying near-death experiences. Death hangs over the novel from the very beginning. If the prospects of dying and loss bother you intensely, don't read it.
Otherwise, do read it. Her characters are marvelously real. A lot of research informs the book but never drives it; I learned from it, but I didn't feel I'd ever been lectured (well, except for one annoying character--who annoys most of the other characters, much like real life).
