The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee

The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee

In the sweeping tradition of The English Patient, Janice Y.K. Lee's debut novel is a tale of love and betrayal set in war-torn Hong Kong. In 1942, Englishman Will Truesdale falls headlong into a passionate relationship with Trudy Liang, a beautiful Eurasian socialite. But their affair is soon threatened by the invasion of the Japanese as World War II overwhelms their part of the world. Ten years later, Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong to work as a piano teacher and also begins a fateful affair. As the threads of this spellbinding novel intertwine, impossible choices emerge-between love and safety, courage and survival, the present, and above all, the past.

I picked this up at one of the newspaper stands in the Philadelphia airport to read on my flight home and I could have made a better selection, but I could have made a worse one. Definitely not something I'm going to run around singing the praises of, but it wasn't completely awful either. Overall, I liked the way the book jumped back and forth in time and the way all the characters connected, but that was about it.

Blackout by Connie Willis

Blackout by Connie Willis

Oxford in 2060 is a chaotic place. Scores of time-traveling historians are being sent into the past, to destinations including the American Civil War and the attack on the World Trade Center. Michael Davies is prepping to go to Pearl Harbor. Merope Ward is coping with a bunch of bratty 1940 evacuees and trying to talk her thesis adviser, Mr. Dunworthy, into letting her go to VE Day. Polly Churchill’s next assignment will be as a shopgirl in the middle of London’s Blitz. And seventeen-year-old Colin Templer, who has a major crush on Polly, is determined to go to the Crusades so that he can “catch up” to her in age.

But now the time-travel lab is suddenly canceling assignments for no apparent reason and switching around everyone’s schedules. And when Michael, Merope, and Polly finally get to World War II, things just get worse. For there they face air raids, blackouts, unexploded bombs, dive-bombing Stukas, rationing, shrapnel, V-1s, and two of the most incorrigible children in all of history—to say nothing of a growing feeling that not only their assignments but the war and history itself are spiraling out of control. Because suddenly the once-reliable mechanisms of time travel are showing significant glitches, and our heroes are beginning to question their most firmly held belief: that no historian can possibly change the past.

From the people sheltering in the tube stations of London to the retired sailors who set off across the Channel to rescue the stranded British Army from Dunkirk, from shopgirls to ambulance drivers, from spies to hospital nurses to Shakespearean actors, Blackout reveals a side of World War II seldom seen before: a dangerous, desperate world in which there are no civilians and in which everybody—from the Queen down to the lowliest barmaid—is determined to do their bit to help a beleaguered nation survive.

The novel ends on a major cliff-hanger, the sort that makes every self-respecting reader go ksjadlkasjdlkasjda CLIFF HANGER WHYYYYYYYYY!!!! And I had that same visceral reaction to this book. It was a GORGEOUS novel. I was sucked right into it. You can't not love the characters and the amount of love and detail that went into getting this novel as historically accurate as a novel about time travel can be was possibly the best part.

But that cliff-hanger! It should be noted that this novel does have a sequel that is supposed to be out this fall and when it does come out I will be reading it. But until then, this novel made me indescribably grumpy at the very end and that's not the sort of reaction you want to be left with.