Doomsday Book

I disliked this book so much, I actually feel like I'm being gaslit by the science fiction reading community. How does this book have 4 stars? How has this book won so many awards, and why does it show up on so many lists? What am I not getting with this book?

I'll admit it. I have some biases. I'm not a huge fan of the "time travel to Olden Times" sub-genre, because the plots follow the same arc "Olden Times sure are hard, but there are some nice people and quaint moments! And there will be some drama around the hero getting back to their own time, but it will work out just in... time." This book is no exception. I will acknowledge that the purpose of the initial time travel was sort of cute, and that the reason the hero might not get back to her own time was interesting, and it seems to set up a little mystery right off the bat. But any goodwill generated by those points was completely destroyed by the execution of this book.

This book was (in my opinion) excruciatingly frustrating to read. The first few chapters were fine, and then it was slogging through hundreds of pages of badly written characters and a poorly-paced plot.

To begin with, there are way too many characters (or character names - there are a number of important people who never actually appear in the book, but you have to remember who they are.) And worse, each character has one trait or motivation that they repeat in every scene throughout the book. (This goes for both major and minor characters, animal and human. There was a bit with a cow wanting to be milked that drove me nearly insane.) Conversations, gags, and even entire scenese seem to repeat over and over again with very little variation and without moving the plot forward. Characters spend hundreds of pages pondering something that the audience was already told. In lieu of showing complex or intense feelings, the characters just repeat the same thought repeatedly by way of a stand-in for emotional depth. And the character development was incredibly juvenile; one of the main character's big revelation was that ugly people can be nice. Oh, good.

The plot itself stalls out almost immediately. In addition to the robotic characters roboting at each other, it feels like fully 75 percent of the action in the "present-day scenes" is just characters trying to track down other characters to ask them a question; not in the past, mind you. Just trying to find or phone people located in the same time period, mostly on the same university campus. (This book is set in Oxford in 2054, but has a weird retro vibe that felt unintentional. I'll grudgingly give the author a pass for not, in 1992, anticipating cell phones and email, but why don't these idiots at least have answering machines? Why is everyone leaving handwritten notes and messages with secretaries like it's 1954?)

The scenes set in the past were meh. I didn't feel like I got much detail I couldn't have gleaned from the pictures in a high school text book, if not less. Occasionally the author felt the need to emphasize some really obvoius fact - I can't remember how many times it was mentioned that there were no antibiotics or other forms of modern medicine in the Middle Ages. (Got it, thanks!) In the end, the great historical adventure was some hazy pre-industrial village of some smallish size, with some people in it, and a barn with some cows (ONE OF WHOM NEEDED TO BE MILKED.)

I'm baffled.