Rating: 4 stars
Nowhere Book Bingo: Award Winner (Won the Hugo and Locus awards in 1998, plus a bunch of others)
Smart Bitches Summer Bingo: Scene on a boat or body of water (there's a lot of rowing on the river)
CBR16 Bingo: Tech (time travel requires pretty specific technology)
This is the second book in the Oxford Time Travel series, but you really don't need to have read the first one, Doomsday Book, to understand and enjoy this one.
In the universe these books are set in, time travel was discovered, but once it was further discovered that no items could be taken back to the future, so it couldn't be used to gain riches or plunder the past of treasures, the technology became used solely by historians, and there are strict rules that must be followed when doing it for academic pursuits.
Ned Henry is an Oxford historian in the 2050s who feels like he's going mad. Lady Schrapnell, a frightfully wealthy and extremely demanding woman is funding the recreation of Coventry Cathedral (in Oxford, for reasons not really explored in the book) and is demanding that absolutely everything is exactly like it was before the Cathedral was destroyed in an air raid during World War II. Ned has been sent on countless missions back to the past to locate something known as the bishop's bird stump (I had to google this, it turns out it's an incredibly ugly vase shaped like a tree stump with decorative birds on it), because that was one of the items apparently present in the church at the time. Because he has been unable to locate it, Ned has had to go back to the past and visit any number of church bazaars and jumble sales in the hopes of finding the blasted relic. If people are sent back too often, they start getting delerious and behave very oddly, so Ned is ordered by his boss to get some rest.
He can't get the required rest in the present, however, because if tyrannical Lady Whatsherface discovers his whereabouts, she'll just demand that he keeps looking for the bird stump. So Ned's boss sends him back to the Victorian age, to hide out for a few weeks and get the much-needed break he requires. In the Victorian age, he encounters a fellow Oxford historian, Verity Kindle, who is trying to undo an unfortunate mistake, and if they don't manage to set things right, it could have consquences for the entire future timeline. While working together to fix Verity's mistake, she and Ned also have to try to make sure that Lady Schrapnell's ancestor, a truly dimwitted girl, doesn't fall in love and marry the wrong person, a task that proves more complicated than one might first have imagined.
I read Doomsday Book back in 2016 and don't remember it very fondly. It was far too long, the plot meandered a lot and because most of the story takes place during the Black Plague, it was also pretty depressing. This book is much lighter in tone, and a lot of the plot plays out like a farce, with humorous mix-ups, misunderstandings, mistaken identities, and a fairly large cast of rather ridiculous characters. The book is also full of literary allusions and clever references to all sorts of academic things, at least 50% of which went entirely over my head. I'm not sure I'm clever enough to appreciate this book on as many levels as the author intended.
Ned and Verity are both extremely likable characters, and my main complaint about the book is that there is so much faffing about and preventing romances between other characters, so there isn't enough time for them to spend together on page, developing their own romance. Nevertheless, this was a fun read, and I'm very much looking forward to my book club's discussion of it in August (we were supposed to have the meeting in June, but too many people were sick or busy, so we just postponed everything over the summer, which also gives more people the chance to read the book). Considering some of the books we've had in the previous months have been rather disappointing, this one felt like a breath of fresh (albeit confusing) air.
Judging a book by its cover: This book has been out for decades, and as such, there are a lot of different covers for it, most of which I dislike. The cover for my e-book copy isn't great either, but at least I like the warm colours on it.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read
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