Saturday, May 27, 2017

Passage --by Connie Willis

Fiction / SF/F  

800 pages / 4910 KB
5 Stars

Warning: Do not begin if you don't have the time to invest in reading this. Yes, it's long, but it's also a page burner. I found it very difficult to put down until finished. I was hooked by the end of reading page one.

I love the descriptions of the people, from the little girl to the old codger whose war stories are never the same twice. And the descriptions of the hospital corridors being randomly blocked off were delightful. I used to work there, but it wasn't a hospital, it was a plane manufacturer.

Joanna Lander is a psychologist studying Near Death Experiences NDEs. She wants the scientific reason for having them. Mr. Mandrake studies them to prove his theory of life after life, and he contaminates the people he interviews by asking leading questions, so she must get to them first. He's also a jerk. Dr. Richard Wright is also doing research on NDEs, and enlists Joanna's help. In order to understand what the subjects go through during an NDE, and to better understand what questions to ask, she becomes one of the test subjects.

This is not your typical story of the Titanic, of life and death, or of NDEs. The chapter epigraphs are marvelous.  By the time I got to the end, I was more than a little curious to see how Willis described the actual death. Though I wanted something just a tad more concrete than she gave us, I think the description was spot on. And, after all, it is a one-way trip.


A marvelous read, and for all its pages, a relatively quick read.

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