To Say Nothing of the Dog (Oxford Time Travel)

by Connie Willis

“Willis effortlessly juggles comedy of manners, chaos theory and a wide range of literary allusions [with a] near flawlessness of plot, character and prose.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From Connie Willis, winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards, comes a comedic romp through an unpredictable world of mystery, love, and time travel.

Ned Henry is badly in need of a rest. He’s been shuttling between the twenty-first century and the 1940s in search of a hideous Victorian vase called “the bishop’s bird stump” as part of a project to restore the famed Coventry Cathedral, destroyed in a Nazi air raid.

But then Verity Kindle, a fellow time traveler, inadvertently brings back something from the past. Now Ned must jump to the Victorian era to help Verity put things right—not only to save the project but also to prevent altering history itself.

• ISBN10: 0553575384
• ISBN13: 9780553575385
• Publish Date: 1 December 1998 (first published 1 December 1997)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group
• Format: Paperback (US Mass Market)
• Pages: 512
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780553575385

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

You have to be in the mood for a screwball comedy of manners, with more banter than His Girl Friday, and a dash of time travel that doesn’t raise the stakes high; if you are in the mood, this is the book for you. I was in the mood.

It has the same ingredients as Crosstalk, but this context worked so much better for me. Even though, as per usual, I’m told Verity is wonderful, so she annoys me, and I’m told Tossie is annoying, so I think she’s wonderful. Mostly because I saw Baine and her crisis of heart coming a mile off. Like, from chapter six. Which made Verity and Ned seem insufferably oblivious. And obnoxious. And judgmental. By the end, I was rooting against them, which of course didn’t change anything, except that I’d read Tossie and Baine In a Boat, To Say Nothing of Dearums Juju.

So maybe it wasn’t flawless, but it was fun. Time-traveling historians (that don’t think or act the way historians would?) proved to be a swell diversion. 3.5 rounded up.