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A review by macponioftdy
The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories by Connie Willis
5.0
It's hard to overstate how much I love Connie Willis. If you read much of her work you start to think she must have experienced some traumatic incidents of getting lost, unending phone tag, or unsatisfactory seances. The repeated missed connections and wandering give her work a dreamlike feeling of unreality and incompleteness. It's repetitive, but leaves me wanting more. You also often have to be able to cast yourself back to a time before we all had phones, facebook, and GPS.
Each story has a short afterword by Willis giving background on the story, often on how she got the idea.
The first story is my favorite, "A Letter from the Clearys." It has a dog and it does an brilliant job of climbing into the head of an adolescent at that time when you're running around independently and trying to participate in the life of the family and sometimes you mess up because you can't read between the lines of adult conversations yet.
The story that doesn't work for me is "Inside Job." It poses some professional skeptics the challenge of wanting to believe in a ghost they've set out to debunk. The world of spirit channelers felt too fake to need debunking, and the skeptics don't hold together as people when faced with the possible ghost of early 20th century skeptic H. L. Mencken. Their logic is not sharp enough - people shouldn't struggle this much with the basic groundings of their job! They also seem to waver between trying to prove and trying to disprove the ghost. In the end there's too much talk about Mencken and not enough about how this experience affects the protagonists.
Each story has a short afterword by Willis giving background on the story, often on how she got the idea.
The first story is my favorite, "A Letter from the Clearys." It has a dog and it does an brilliant job of climbing into the head of an adolescent at that time when you're running around independently and trying to participate in the life of the family and sometimes you mess up because you can't read between the lines of adult conversations yet.
The story that doesn't work for me is "Inside Job." It poses some professional skeptics the challenge of wanting to believe in a ghost they've set out to debunk. The world of spirit channelers felt too fake to need debunking, and the skeptics don't hold together as people when faced with the possible ghost of early 20th century skeptic H. L. Mencken. Their logic is not sharp enough - people shouldn't struggle this much with the basic groundings of their job! They also seem to waver between trying to prove and trying to disprove the ghost. In the end there's too much talk about Mencken and not enough about how this experience affects the protagonists.