A review by sdwoodchuck
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

5.0

Kivrin is a student of history at Oxford college in a near future where historians are able to travel back through time to experience their chosen eras in the flesh. Against the wishes of her professor Mr. Dunworthy, she volunteers for a trip back to 1300’s Britain, and is dropped into the past just hours before the onset of a viral pandemic–with which she is also infected. When Kivrin wakes in the home of a family of nobles in hiding, it’s a struggle against her own immune system and the realization that an error has left her decades later than planned, with the Black Death is just around the corner. Back in near-future Oxford, Mr. Dunworthy works against countless obstacles to try and re-establish contact with Kivrin, but the quarantines and restrictions placed to appease the ignorant leave him struggling to make headway.

I loved this book. It’s slow and it’s unwieldy and Willis has a strange obsession with phone tag, but my goodness she can write characters that I care about. In the hands of a worse author, this would be a slog through long stretches with not much happening for long stretches, but here it is just a remarkable slow roll into dread and panic and sometimes tragedy. It’s also remarkably prescient about the response to a modern pandemic, for a book written in the early 90’s.