I wondered if Willis was going to include a quick summary of the first book, or spend some of the story time rehashing the plot of the first one. I guess she did neither?
The Wikipedia article on *Blackout *has a nice description of the characters and where they ended up.
All four of George R. R. Martin’s current series books are over 1000 pages. I see absolutely no reason why Willis’ book could not have been published as a single book. Willis’ most recent novel, Passage, rang in at 800 pages.
As noted above, All Clear simply picks up where Blackout left off. It’s a publisher’s or an author’s decision to try to get two books worth of money out of one book, and I will not support that.
Certainly I’ll read it, eventually, but I will not urge the library to buy extra copies, nor will I add it to my library. It’s a business model which I do not care to throw my money at.
Sorry, Connie.
Here’s an interesting read from an author in the business about why books are the length they are: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/03/cmap-5-why-books-are-the-lengt.html.
Basically, according to Charlie Stross, it’s a combination of hardcovers get more expensive to bind above 400 pages or so and downward pressure on what most book buyers are willing to pay these days. They probably make exceptions for blockbusters like George R. R. Martin. Mid-list authors like Charlie Stross - and Connie Willis is probably one as well - not so much.
(Passage is about ten years old. Things were different then.)
My hardcover Martin books are all under 1000 pages -the thickest one is 973. Even my Neal Stephenson hardbacks are all under 1000 pages.
*Blackout *is 491 pages, and All Clear is 641, so together it would have been over 1100 pages. I guess that really is on the edge of being too big for single book. Unless she burns a lot of pages in All Clear reminding the reader of things that happened in the first book.
Besides, now that I have them together, I really like the look of the two books together. The contrasting covers are great.
Well, I was going to be all “yeah, suck it, CW” but I’m all back into it, although that means I’m back to wanting to murder the characters. (I felt like that in To Say Nothing of the Dog, though, back in the day, and now remember that book with nothing but fondness. Plus, a lot of what annoyed me was in fact what the poor continuity was doing to protect itself. I have to tell myself that’s what’s going on here, right?)
I just finished All Clear. That was an amazing book.
I know - I’m in the middle of A Feast for Crows at the moment, and my wrists ache from holding the damn thing.
I like to read lying down, in bed, or on the couch. Big, thick books are difficult to hold in that position. It’s actually one of my criteria when I’m about to buy a book and am considering Kindle versus print - the larger the book, the more likely I am to buy the Kindle version.
God, these are some stupid-ass grad students. I mean, really. I wouldn’t send some of these people down to the grocery store for a gallon of milk, let alone to the Blitz.
… and I was up most of the night with it, even knowing I had to be at work short-staffed this morning. Christ, it’s like having an anxiety dream while you’re awake.
My favorite line, and one of many near the end that made me want to cry and laugh at the same time: (avoid if you’re completely spoiler-averse, although it’s not a pivotal moment and out of context it doesn’t give much away)
Did we win the war?
Well, I finished it and I was in a sad daze for the rest of the day. I was trying to clean up in the bedroom and do some purging of clothes that don’t fit, and I ended up thinking about everything when I wore any specific shirt and crying on my bed.
Oh no, Zsofia, it has a sad ending? Most of Connie Willis’s work is funny, but she can be absolutely brutal.
I ended up rereading all of Blackout, and now I’m about 1/3 of the way through All Clear. I suppose Willis needed one of the historians to be a dummy so that the others could explain things to her, but:
(not really spoilers, but discussing events in All Clear)
[spoiler]It’s pretty hard to believe that Eileen/Merope has never even heard of Bletchley Park. I realize that the knowledge wasn’t necessary for her specific mission to study the evacuated children, but a graduate history student who’s at all interested in WWII England who’s never even heard of Bletchley Park?
And it’s really annoying that Polly, in particular, is keeping information from Merope and Michael, just to protect them from worrying.
[/spoiler]
Well, I wouldn’t say it has a sad ending. Not necessarily. It depends on if you think it’s a tragedy or a comedy. 
I did burst into tears when we found out Binnie’s
final name, which told you everything you needed to know before she told you.
But yeah, that’s the stuff that drove me nuts - Merope isn’t some six year old child, she’s a grownup grad student! And there’s all this unnecessary bullshit about “don’t want to worry ____” - just stupid. We’re in a war here! It was quite deft how their identities eventually took over - when’s the last time they said “Merope”?
I was tired last night and made myself stop 100 pages from the end, so I wouldn’t finish the book in a complete daze. It’s good, but I still don’t understand…
… Michael Davies’ motivation for faking his death so he could go off alone to hunt for Atherton. Why wouldn’t he just tell Merope and Polly that’s what he was doing?
Because they’re the stupidest grad students of all time.
ETA - to be a little fairer, the girls kept freaking out at the idea of splitting up - understandable, since they were all lucky to meet up in the first place and it was very difficult to find anybody all the time. Mike wanted to look for Atherton and got the chance he thought would allow him to do it with the intelligence work. Bad storytelling, though - when he first “died” I cried. When he died for the second time, I mean, what, he was already dead to me. The whole technique of not revealing two whole people and their aliases until the book developed further was very stilted and artificial.
Well, I finished it. It was excellent - as long as you can overlook a few things, like the fact that the time travel department at Oxford is completely inept and understaffed.
[spoiler]Am I missing something about Colin? Is he a descendant of Eileen’s? I keep re-reading the last few pages, where old Binnie starts to tell Colin something but stops. (“How strange. I wonder if she… That would explain…”) And then at the very end Polly is looking at Colin and thinks that she should have seen the resemblance before.
I’m so thrilled that Eileen ended up with the vicar! (I’ve stopped thinking of her as Merope as well.)
I can’t decide if the technique of hiding the identities of Ernest and Douglas and Mary Kent for so long was essential to the structure of the book or not.
I can imagine that lots of the details (like the Yellow Peril, and watching out for the handsy officers) came from the personal stories of those ladies Willis interviewed at the Imperial War Museum.[/spoiler]
Yes, I think it’s pretty clear who Colin is.
Do you think these people are insured? What kind of company would write a policy on the world’s stupidest time travelers? “Let’s see… every time you go back in the past you almost destroy the universe and catch cholera. No, I don’t think so.” Do their mothers know what’s involved in their coursework? At what point do they, you know, sit down and write a paper?
Okay, it was not clear to me who Colin was. All along, I figured out the various identities, but all that bit at the end, what Eileen knew back in Oxford (from the last pages of All Clear), I even went back and reread that part in Blackout, and I still don’t know.
I figured a couple of things reading Blackout, which did happen. [spoiler]Notably, that Colin would arrange some kind of thing so he was old enough. Which happened.
But I can’t figure out who he could be, that Eileen would have known about it when they were all back at Oxford waiting for their drops.[/spoiler]
Also I keep getting completely confused by real-time and flash-time, even though I was at a book signing where Connie Willis explained it quite well. Guess I should have taken notes.
Colin isn’t anybody in the book, he’s
Eileen and the vicar’s descendant. He looks like Eileen.