Even before I began to read this book I knew that Connie Willis was an author well respected in the science fiction community. Successfully adorned and rewarded with Hugo awards and Nebula awards she is an author continuously recognized for her work. I opened this novel with high expectations. The plot of this novel goes a little something like this - A woman travels back through time to complete her doctoral thesis - but due to an accident, she lands in the middle of the Black Plague of 1348. The Oxford she left behind is laid low by a flu released from the grave of the knight from the era she's visiting. The year from which she is sent is 2054. The matter-of-fact blasé attitudes in sending someone back top the past rankles. The technology behind transporting somebody back to the past is fuzzy, the people who are left to run operations are somewhat incompetent, and when the influenza outbreak and subsequent quarantine falls on the luckless many in Oxford it lacks accountability. It seems as if the author failed to take into consideration such as how and when the quarantine would be handled, and the over the top remonstrations felt by those caught up by it; simply not believable. In 1354, Kivrin tries to record what life is like for the people of the era. She is clueless as to her true predicament. Believing it to be 1320 she stumbles into a terrible chapter of Western European history: The Black Death. Here I can say that Willis has created a world with grittier and harsher people. Life was not easy for the man and woman of that particular era and the detail and recounting of how people would react to the sudden appearance of a woman struck down by thieves sets the tone very well. However, nothing much happens! Well, that may not be the point but it is most certainly what occurs. I have no doubt it is historically accurate, it reeks of authenticity - but so what. I read this believing it to be more than it actually is. Doomsday Book is littered with a lot of niggling faults but it is a very genuine and appealing read in its own manner. I would loved to have given this novel an eight but it simply descended into a rather tepid and washed out plot full of holes and characters being eradicated by the Bubonic Plague. If we were meant to draw a contrast between how lucky people in the twenty first century have it with advanced medicine while those in The Middle Ages were saying prayers and bleeding unfortunates - it doesn't work. The two disparate yet commensurate storylines about a contagion rampaging through a clueless and frightened populace is delivered with an over-the-top ingenuousness. Willis never really gives the reader a sense of fear or trepidation for the hapless in modern day Oxford. Also, her sense of humour falls flat on its face. It annoys to have to give this novel a mediocre mark: but here it is.

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