D.A. by Connie Willis
76 pages
Published 2007
Read April 20
Rating: ★½ out of 5
I'll be honest, I only read this novella to artificially inflate my book numbers for the month. Connie Willis tends to be reliably enjoyable -- I would read as many of her Oxford time travel novels as she'd care to produce -- so I figured that, in her hands, a quick romp about a shanghaied space cadet would be a fine way to kill an hour. The jacket flap makes comparisons to Heinlein's early adventure novels; how could it go wrong? Yet this slip of a book left me feeling like it had no reason to exist. There was no point to any of it. It would be too generous to say it reads like YA fiction -- the whole thing reads like a teenage sci-fi fan wrote it. It is both too short and too long, for what it is: too rushed to develop any sense of character or place, yet too frequently bogged down in confused phone calls and stammered "I shouldn't be here, get me out of this" exchanges to develop any momentum. The closest comparison I can make is to the setup chapters of one of my own early novels, hastily written with no concern for character development or prose quality; the denouement in particular seemed like something I would have considered amazing and groundbreaking when I was 14.
It's a mess, even for a book I read just for filler. And that's disappointing, given Willis' other works.
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