Zwarte winter (1992)

A dry, slow, humorless, illness-focused story involving a lot of people consistently failing to understand one another in normal conversation. Characters who are supposed to be highly educated and quite clever are unable to understand simple statements or make themselves understood using the same. The smartest and most believable character is a 12 year old boy, who acts more realisticly than any of the adults.

I don't enjoy reading descriptions of people who are ill, their symptoms, the methods of caring for them, or the anguish they're experiencing. I find descriptions of young people and children becoming ill and dying especially unpleasant. These made up a significant portion of this book, and they were wearying without adding anything of value to my experience.

There were some questions posed very early on in the story that the characters were fixated on. While the answers were obvious to the reader, the questions were not answered in any satisfying way for the characters until 2/3 of the way through the book, by which time their quest for answers that were painfully obvious to the reader was beyond tedious. Even after the elements of the story have started to come together, it is still depressing, tedious, and myopically focused on illnesses.

I like the idea of a story where the conflict is almost entirely between people and sickness rather than between different people, but this take on it is just too bleak for my tastes. I found the way it wrapped up to be satisfying, just not enough to justify the slog that got me there. ( )

This one surprised me many times, lots of clever bits and humor, but then it settles into some harrowing emotional stuff by the end. ( )

I really love this historical fiction/time travel mashup. I'm looking forward to the rest of the series. Curious to see which characters are regulars.

And, ftr, I don't think I'll ever forget that the Black Plague arrived in Great Britain in 1348. ( )

I had read this before, so I knew what was coming. A little hard to read about pandemic's under the current conditions.

I like that Kivrin struggles to understand people in the past. How can we really know how the language sounded in the past? When Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon were in engaged they wrote to each other in Latin. Than when she arrived they found they could not understand each other because they had been taught different pronunciations.

Collin was a lot of fun. I loved William Gaddson and his mother. ( )

Oxford Time Travel series #1
Winner of 1993 Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards

Winner of 1993 Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards
Mr. Dunworthy and his team plan a visit for Kivrin to 1320 that turns out to be 1348 Christmastime – Black Death in Oxford.

Because of an unrelated current-day epidemic that started with Badri the drop operator, the stupid vice-head of medieval closes the lab and won’t let Dunworthy in. Badri is delirious and close to death in hospital so no one knows until the pick-up date is well past that Kivrin is in the wrong year. Everyone in the village she is visiting dies, and she alone is left, bereft, by the time Dunworthy and 12-year-old Colin arrive to rescue her.

Pg74 American visitor to “current-day” Oxford when told to go to another area for safety:
“’Explain! Perhaps you’d like to explain it to me, too. I’m not used to having my civil liberties taken away like this. In America, nobody would dream of telling you where you can’t go.’

And over thirty million Americans died during the [fictional] Pandemic [of 2006?] as a result of that sort of thinking, [Dunworthy] thought.”

Willis published this book in 1993, yet how it sounds exactly like America today! ( )